West Africa Reivew (2002)
ISSN: 1525-4488
DISCOURSE ON GENDER: HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY AND THE ETHICS OF INTELLECTUAL WORK
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West Africa Reivew (2002) ISSN: 1525-4488 DISCOURSE ON GENDER: HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY AND THE ETHICS OF INTELLECTUAL WORK |
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Oyekan Owomoyela
The family being the primary social unit in the African community structure, discussion of matters pertaining to it must be carried out with some seriousness and due regard for its integrity. Gender relations, the manner in which men relate to women and vice versa, is one such matter, one that has attracted considerable interest in recent years. Like discussions on other aspects of African life that on gender and family relations has been subject to assumptions, intentional or otherwise, of modern Western normativity, the assumption that the modern Western way is the correct way and all others are malignancies. Moreover, examinations African relational practices and their rationales too often tend to be undertaken from already constituted positions that predetermine the nature of the findings.
The problem is nothing new, of course, as it simply continues the deliberate misrepresentation of African life that was routine during the colonial period, the “inferiorization” of non-Western cultures, and the dehumanization of non-Western candidates for exploitation, colonization, or extermination, a practice, incidentally, that the Nazis applied to Jews in ideological support of their final solution policy. The candidates for exploitation and victimization had to be exposed as so far removed from the acceptable norms of human behavior that their humanity itself becomes questionable. Edward Said calls the manichean practice (which lumps the non-Occidental world into one) “Orientalization,” and quotes one of its explicators as saying, “ . . . the Oriental generally acts, speaks, and thinks in a manner exactly opposite to the European” (Orientalism 39). Moreover, Said continues, Orientalism
shares with magic and with mythology the self-containing, self-reinforcing character of a closed system, in which objects are what they are because they are what they are, for once, for all time, for ontological reasons that no empirical material can dislodge or alter (Orientalism 70).
In other words, with regard to all aspects of Oriental life, and by implication African life, as it was in the beginning, it is now, and ever shall be. That doctrine offers, among other things, the convenience of being able to project present phenomena backward and forward in time, and even laterally, and also to make sweeping generalizations from the most inconsequential incident.
The Orientalization of African instincts and behavior in gender matters is a dominant and thus inescapable feature of discussions of African societies, discussions that are often grounded on the article of faith that African societies were organized to exploit and abuse women, sometimes in unimaginably inhuman ways. The implication, of course, is that the organizing was the sole responsibility of men, that it was for their exclusive benefit, and that women either never had any say in the matter, or were beaten into acceptance of their slavish status. Furthermore, the conviction goes, African women’s emancipation and salvation will come only when African men have are civilized out of their traditional ways and into Western habits of the mind.
To repeat, the demonization of African instincts and behavior with regard to gender is nothing new, nor is the preference by far too many writers for the worst possible explanations or rationalizations for African practices in this regard over convincing, innocent, even socially responsible alternatives available to them. An example that springs to mind immediately is the practice of polygamy. It has never been an exclusively African phenomenon, but it functions today as a characteristic index of African men’s imprisonment in sexual primitivism. Another is the practice in which surviving male relatives of a deceased man may inherit his surviving wives, to some commentators an eloquent indicator of the subjection and commodification of African women. Mariama Bâ’s representation of both practices in her deservedly well received book So Long a Letter is a case in point (Owomoyela, 1996: 126-42).
In the paragraphs that follow I will focus on the works of certain prominent writers, primarily Ayi Kwei Armah, Chinua Achebe, and Buchi Emecheta, to illustrate my argument, and conclude with some comments on the misrepresentation of the regard of the woman in Africa.
I begin with Ayi Kwei Armah, because he suggests a genesis for African patriarchal victimization of women. In Two Thousand Seasons, the historical epic in which he purports to document the trials and tribulations African peoples have experiences in the last millennium, Armah indicates that the suppression and exploitation of women are contrary to “the way, our way,” being habits that opportunistic, bamboozled admirers of white ways copied from the white “predators” from the desert:
In the suppression of women first, in the reduction of all females to things—things for pleasure, things for use, things in the hands of men—these admirers of the white predators’ road saw a potent source of strength for men. . . . In such arrangements the admirers saw the roots of the white predators’ power. Along that road they urged our going. (59).
The admirers describe the consequences of the unleashing of the white predators’ power on the hapless black people—the decimation of the population in attacks of “the white beasts from the desert and their askaris” (the opportunistic black people who served as their hired guns), and the loss of many more people when the community fled and embarked on a perilous crossing of the bogland in order to get as far away from the predators as possible. Those experiences notwithstanding, their black admirers found the white predators’ ways worthy of emulation. In order to make up for lost numbers, they argued, what better way was there “than to make every female a childbearer as soon as her body showed it was ready, and for as long as her body continued to turn manseed to harvest?” (60) Having been made into machines for processing “manseed,” women would have no other function than “the raising of a multitude of children and the provision of a home for them”; that “would be work sufficient for all female energies.” Men would then have “exclusive rights to settle matters beyond the maintenance of bodies in particular homes, and . . . powers to make their judgments effective” (60)
If one wonders where the women were when all of this was being argued and decided, or whether they attempted to make their presence felt and their voices heard, Armah tells us, “Overwhelmed, the women in their astonishment accepted the place of childbearing bodies, in their souls wondering why the ability to do such necessary work should bring as its reward such vindictive slavery at the hands of men” (60). But in his telling some women rebelled against “the childbearing, homekeeping destiny,” and refused to be part of “the production of mere zombi bodies in a community doomed . . . to fall prey to enslavers among ourselves . . .” (60).
African cultures fetishize childbearing, to the extent that woman-as-mother is accorded almost divine status. African women, traditionally, at least, accordingly craved motherhood as a sort of fulfillment, and not because men forced them to do so, or because they saw compliance with this supposedly male imposition as a means of appeasing men. If modern African women regard motherhood as a form of victimization devised by men the explanation is that in this regard they have embraced the spirit of a faction of feminist Europe.
Ng觫 wa Thiong’o took a different tack from Armah in Devil on the Cross but he essentially accomplished the same goal of calling African family relations into question, and in fact symbolically blocking the possibility of its actualization or survival. I refer in particular to the ending of the novel. Jacinta War««nga, a young brilliant student, lived with her uncle at Nakuru, because the imperialists had jailed her father and mother for their involvement in the Mau Mau resistance movement, and on their release they did not wish to interrupt her education. Without her knowledge her uncle promised her as “‘some >veal’ or a ‘spring chicken’” to The Rich Old Man from Ngorika in return for some favors (142-43). The Old Man got her pregnant and abandoned her. She later succeeded in learning secretarial skills and securing employment with Boss K«hara, the only prospective employer who did not ask her for sex beforehand. But in time he too asked her to become his “sugar girl,” and when she refused he not only fired her but had her kicked out of her rented room. Even more devastating to her was that the young man she thought loved her refused to believe her account but deserted her after accusing her of inventing a story only after her lover had tired of her (21-25).
In the end, having achieved a remarkable self-transformation at the end of which she is a most accomplished auto mechanic, a formidable martial artist, and a self-assured, pistol-packing beauty, she is set to marry the musicologist Gatu«ria. He has long been estranged from his wealthy father, Hispaniora Greenway Gitahi of Ngorika Heavenly Orchards, and both plan to use the occasion of the betrothal of the young lovers to proclaim their reconciliation. Gatu«ria and Jacinta drive to Ngorika Heavenly Orchards for the occasions, and she is shocked to discover that her prospective father-in-law is the father of her daughter, the same Old Man from Ngorika, who got her pregnant and abandoned her so long ago. In keeping with her newfound self-confidence she pronounces sentence on The Old Man, pulls out her gun, and executes him. She also shoots out the kneecaps of two of the guests before calmly walking away. Not knowing what to do, Gatu«ria watched, “hearing in his mind music that lead him nowhere,” as “War««nga walked on, without looking back” (254).
What interests most in the story, beyond the familiar portrayal of men as inveterate misogynistic sex offenders, is the ritual interdiction of the wedding plans of the young man and woman. That detail is significant especially considering that in African cultures the main reason for marriages is the imperative of producing offspring to continue the race, an obligation that men and women embrace equally. Students of folklore and drama will also be familiar with the use of weddings in both genre to ritually ensure the continuity of society and the human race. In Devil on the Cross not only is the promise of a wedding aborted, there is also an absence of any healthy, functional already constituted family.
The pattern of aborted matrimonial plans is also discernible in Achebe’s Anthills of the Savanna, a work the author wrote expressly to establish his feminist credentials as well as his solidarity with the masses. In Beatrice Achebe sought to make amends for feminist criticisms of his treatment of women in his earlier fiction by offering them a professional woman operating on the same stage as the most powerful men in the land. Furthermore, in set speeches by Ikem, chapters devoted to Beatrice’s feminist ruminations and condemnations of the malignant patriarchal inclinations (and actions) of her father and to some extent Sam and even Chris, and Beatrice’s final symbolic acts of appropriating the right to name Amaechina (normally reserved for a patriarch) and conferring a male name on a female child, Achebe elaborates both discursive and practical bolsters for his new ideological position.
To return, though, to the question of aborted or absent matrimonies, it is significant, I believe, that Achebe’s principals remain single. His Excellency Sam is unmarried: “he didn’t marry the English girl MM found for him in Surrey” because he was frightened off the idea by Chris’s bad experience with his American wife Louise (45). Chris had been married to Louise, but the marriage lasted only six months, and was never consummated. Ikem was always uncomfortable in his somewhat rocky relationship with Elewa. He would never let her spend the night in his flat but forces her to go home by taxi in the small hours of the night after their lovemaking. His explanation is self-indulgent and specious:
I have never seen the sense in sleeping with people. A man should wake up in his own bed. A woman likewise. Whatever they choose to do prior to sleeping is no reason to deny them that right. I simply detest the notion of waking up and finding beside you somebody naked and unappetizing. It is unfair to you and especially to her. So I have never bargained with my right to repossess my apartment and my freedom fully. (34; his italics)
One has to assume that, harboring that phobia, his description of Elewa’s mother as “my prospective mother-in-law” (144) must be received with some skepticism. In any case, he died before he would have had to make good in the implied promise.
One can argue that he does father a child posthumously with Elewa, thus enacting the possibility of racial (and human) renewal, but one can equally argue that the author found a way of suggesting that possibility, but while at the same time doing away with the offensive institution of marriage. I am also aware that Braimoh has a family, and that in the generally optimistic denouement to the novel Emmanuel has begun a relationship with the woman he met on the bus on the journey to the north. But in the scheme of the novel the “green bottles” were the makers of history (despite its verbalized Marxist assignment of the privilege to the masses), and Emmanuel’s budding roman is not anything to bank upon.
Overall, Anthills of the Savannah is Achebe’s response to leftist criticism of the works of established African writers, especially Wole Soyinka and certainly Chinua Achebe, for their failure to use their writing for materialist analyses of society and enlistment on the side of the exploited classes in the quest for a class-less, equitable world. While Soyinka dismissed the leftists, the Chinweizu-led self-styled bolekaja critics, and slammed them in essays like “The Autistic Hunt: Or How to Marximise Mediocrity,” Achebe sought their acceptance by writing his new novel largely according to their specifications. Ikem’s character, for example, satisfies the Marxists’ demand that intellectuals should follow their example and lose themselves amidst the masses. Accordingly he champions the common cause in his editorials, dates an illiterate woman, and rides a decrepit car-gestures that prove just as empty and unconvincing as the Marxists’ own claim to represent the masses. Moreover, his speech before the students at Kangan University is very much an attempt at the sort of Marxist analysis and activism the leftists advocated.
As far as gender is concerned, Achebe’s use of Beatrice and her role in the novels to ingratiate himself with leftist feminists is quite transparent, and the measure of his success is feminists’ frequent citation of Anthills as a work informed by a progressive attitude towards gender relations, in contrast to his earlier works which they see as suffused with patriarchal subjection of women.
A recent discussion on the postcolonial web page concerning the concept of agbala in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is pertinent at this point. Alpana Knippling wanted some clarification on the use of the word to denote “woman” as well as worthless men, but at the same time for the powerful Oracle served by Chielo. In her response Myrna Nurse of Presbyterian College cited an earlier scholar who had argued that Achebe’s statements on gender in the novel are inconsistent, for “while Achebe’s own literary agenda is to restore dignity and self-respect to African people, he is not particularly interested in doing that for women.” Nurse continued:
Achebe’s own contradiction, possibly ambivalence, becomes obvious in the power he ascribes in Things Fall Apart to the mother as supreme and the motherland as protector of the erring man-child, an obvious ambivalence toward the role of mother/woman, which may be attributable to Achebe’s cultural collusion with Western civilization. To his credit, in one of his later works, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), he reverses this female subordination and ascribes to the woman a somewhat more equitable position, in social (if not necessarily political) configurations. At least, the African woman has descended from the Virgin-Mary pedestal in Anthills, if she were ever up there to begin with. (Sept. 28, 2000)
Two symbolic acts by Beatrice enable Nurse to come to her conclusion: her appropriating the naming function from the patriarch, and her conferring a male name on the female child. I believe that Nurse’s conclusion can use some revision. In the first place, I believe that Achebe’s portrayal of women in his earlier novel is quite sensitive, and that it accurately depicts the regard Umuofia has for women, despite instances of abuse of women by men, which are in any case never applauded or condoned. I also believe that the picture in Anthills is artificial and suspect, precisely because it the novel is formulaic, designed to win approval from Marxists and feminists. I will elaborate.
In Things Fall Apart Achebe offers his reader several glimpses of gender related matters, in actions by individuals as well as the community. Instances include, among others, Nwakibie’s regard for his most senior wife especially, and the younger ones also, when Okonkwo visited him to ask for seed yams; the masked judges’ pronouncement in their chastisement of Uzowulu the wife beater; and the discussion about the relationship between Ogbuefi Ndulue and his first wife Ozoemena. With regard to this last, the discussion takes place when Okonkwo, on his first outing after killing Ikemefuna because he did not want to appear weak, visits Obierika and chastises him for not coming out to participate in the killing. The discussion shifts to the strangeness of the recent deaths, Ozoemena’s happening on the same day as her husband’s, and Obierika comments that the two were always of one mind, and that “He could not do anything without telling her.” Somewhat surprised, Okonkwo responds, “I thought he was a strong man in his youth.” When Ofoedu says he indeed was Okonkwo indicates his doubt, which draws the confirmatory comment from Obierika, “He led Umuofia to war in those days” [ ] (47-48).
Achebe uses the incident to press the lesson that a person could be sensitive, considerate, and caring, could, moreover, have a decent regard for women, and yet be strong. More specifically, Achebe shows that in the traditional setting, even the strongest of spouses would not embark on a project without consulting his wife.
In Anthills one of Achebe’s clearest statements on gender is couched in Ikem’s thesis elaborated in the poetic “strange love letter” he reads to Beatrice on their last meeting. In it he describes the insight on gender relations he says Beatrice taught him. In place of “the original oppression of woman,” which was based on “crude denigration,” modern man has devised a more “enlightened” approach; he has lifted woman from “right under his foot where she’d been since Creation” reverently placed her on a pedestal. There she is “just as irrelevant to the practical decisions of running the world as she was in the bad old days. The only difference is that now Man will suffer no guilt feelings; he can sit back and congratulate himself on his generosity and gentlemanliness.” There she is until the world “crashes around Man’s ears, [and] Woman in her supremacy . . . descend[s to] sweep the shard together” (89). He drive the point home by saying that Woman, here represented by Beatrice, must determine the now role for women: “You have to tell us. We never asked you before. And perhaps because you’ve never been asked you may not have thought about it; you may not have the answer handy” (90; his italics). In other words, whatever consideration man accords woman is a mere devious ruse, a deceitful stratagem to get her out of the picture by pretending to honor her. Achebe illustrates the woman’s ameliorative role after Man’s irresponsible default in the sequence where Beatrice, rather than the designated patriarch, names Amaechina.)
The Ndulue-Ozoemena example and Ikem’s dissertation acknowledge respect for the woman’s input. In other words, in neither work does Achebe subscribe to the imputation that African patriarchy reduces the woman to irrelevance. Yet the earlier picture is more sympathetic to the African social order. We can proffer several explanations for the shift in Achebe’s perception. One would be that Achebe is in fact not being inconsistent, because he depicts not so much the reality but the apprehension if it by fictional characters, Obierika and Ikem. Obierika is a traditional man through and through, the conscience of Umuofia, whereas Ikem is an alienated, Western refashioned neo-African, who sees his society through the translucent patina of his Western indoctrination.
More significantly, Achebe’s (as Ikem’s) representation of the woman in Anthills does little more than insult her in its attempt to pander to her. It depicts a supine and feckless object always acted upon and somehow never capable of asserting herself. The portrait is strikingly similar to Armah’s (cited above). Man originally denigrates her to serve his own ends, and when he finds denigration no longer attractive, he relocates her from under his foot and places her on a pedestal. Both at rest and in being moved she is lifeless and will-less. When she finally acts it is because Man calls her forth, practically breathes life into her, but only for the limited purpose of cleaning up his mess.
In a sense the scenario is consistent with the one mainstream Western feminism has popularized, inasmuch as it concedes to patriarchy a free hand in devising, inaugurating, and perpetuating the oppression of women, even though they were always present in society.
The statement about descent from the pedestal, which concurs with Ikem’s suggestion in his love poem to Beatrice, discounts the insistent characterization of Beatrice as a priestess and a goddess, a characterization that sets her apart from the common run of humanity.
In this late work Beatrice is a university educated top-level civil servant, a Senior Assistant Secretary in the ministry of finance, the equal of the male principals in all regards except for the contingent perquisites that come with being a head of state or a minister of state. Her symbolic (along with her real) stature is underscored when Sam invites (or summons) her to the reception for Lou Cranford, the pushy American journalist, as proof that Kangan has her own women of substance. In addition, Ikem credits his, in the “love letter” with teaching him a more progressive appreciation of women, and in the chapter entitled “Daughters,” she is identified with the goddess Idemili, while in the section “nwanyibuife” she is “priestess,” and “prophetess” (104-05).
The culmination of Achebe’s symbolic emancipation of women through the character of Beatrice comes at the end of the novel, after her male co-protagonists have all been killed off. The occasion is the naming of Ikem’s posthumous child by Elewa. The ceremony takes place at Beatrice’s home, which has become the meeting place for the custodians of Ikem’s vision. As tradition mandated the naming was to be performed by the oldest male relative available, in this case Elewa’s uncle. When long after the appointed time he still had not made an appearance, preoccupied with drinking we are made to understand, Beatrice assumes the role. What more, she gives the female child the name Amaechina, “May the path never close,” a name usually given to male children. As for the tradition that men should be name givers Beatrice says, “I think our tradition is faulty there. It is really safest to ask the mother what her child is or means or should be called” (204). When the old man, the uncle, finally arrives he ratifies what Beatrice has accomplished and bestows his blessings on the new order her action signifies.
The action is significant in two regards: Beatrice appropriates a role that had hitherto been assigned to males, thus correcting wayward tradition; also, in a gesture that reflects and reconfirms the message of her appropriation, she gives a male name to a female child, symbolically asserting her worthiness on a par with male children.
Achebe’s gambit might endear him to feminists who see this work as an endorsement of their struggle to obliterate gender-based inequities, but their approbation results from too facile a reading of his strategy. They apparently see no reason to wonder about the qualitative differences between Beatrice’s role in the novel and those of Sam, Chris, and Ikem. The men are the actual agonists directly involved in the drama, staking their lives on their ideological convictions. Their actions directly determine and influence the direction of events. Beatrice’s role is exactly as Sam’s summons that she attend the Abichi reception indicates: she is a token. Whereas it would be possible for her to be involved in meaningful, determinate action as a Senior Assistant Secretary in the ministry of finance, blowing the whistle on official corruption, for example, and causing some quakes in Sam’s government, Achebe involves her only as Chris’s girlfriend. It is primarily in that capacity, and secondarily as Ikem’s friend, that she features in the story. Even towards the end when she steals the child-naming function her action remains in the private, domestic sphere, not on the public arena.
As for the significance of naming a girl Amaechina, the intention is to confer on the child all the attributes and possibilities maleness confers on a child. In other words, she is symbolically transformed into a male child, with the expectation that all the benefits of maleness will devolve on her. The strategy is not very different from that of the militant feminists who go to great lengths to obliterate all external traits of femininity, coiffure, clothing, comportment, and the like, in order to become as male (or masculine) as possible. The statement is obvious: femininity is a sign of things undesirable; masculinity is the end of desire. The question is equally obvious: how does a rejection of femininity translate to an affirmation of femininity? Or, how does making oneself into a man empower one as a woman? involves her only as Chris’s girlfriend. It is primarily in that capacity, and secondarily as Ikem’s friend, that she features in the story. Even towards the end when she steals the child-naming function her action remains in the private, domestic sphere, not on the public arena.
As for the significance of naming a girl Amaechina, the intention is to confer on the child all the attributes and possibilities maleness confers on a child. In other words, she is symbolically transformed into a male child, with the expectation that all the benefits of maleness will devolve on her. The strategy is not very different from that of the militant feminists who go to great lengths to obliterate all external traits of femininity, coiffure, clothing, comportment, and the like, in order to become as male (or masculine) as possible. The statement is obvious: femininity is a sign of things undesirable; masculinity is the end of desire. The question is equally obvious: how does a rejection of femininity translate to an affirmation of femininity? Or, how does making oneself into a man empower one as a woman?
The conferment of maleness on Elewa’s daughter, and its rationalization, probably influenced Ifi Amadiume’s apparent invention of the status of “male daughter” in Igbo culture, achievement of which supposedly empowers the achiever. Another Igbo scholar takes issue with her, though, on this and other points. According to Nzegwu Nkiru, the concept predicates full family membership on “>being male’ rather than on >being a child;’ it casts daughters as less-worthy than sons; and it confers value on them only if they can somehow become sons. Not only does this state of affairs misconstrue the principle of family-as-lineage formation and what it means to be a father, it arbitrarily nullifies daughters’ membership to their own obi.”
Beatrice, recounts her father’s abusiveness towards her mother, abusiveness that made Beatrice wish him dead many times over when in her youth she witnessed his cruelty to her mother. She makes us understand that her mother believed that his cruelty stemmed from her failure to bear sons, and that when she was pregnant with BB she desperately prayed for a son, after four successive female births. When the new baby turned out to be a girl, says BB, her mother bore her a huge grudge, apparently for ensuring her father’s continued cruelty. In addition to Beatrice they gave her an Igbo name, Nwanyibuife, meaning “A female is also something,” a name she hated. “Can you beat that?” She asks. “Even as a child I disliked the name most intensely without being aware of its real meaning. It merely struck me at that point that I knew of nobody else with the name; it seemed fudged!” (79).
The name could as easily be an emphatic affirmation: A girl is also something, as Achebe does indicate (to his credit) (96); but here it is presented as a grudging, insincere concession of value to the girl-child.
The discursive and extra-discursive manoeuvers to eliminating difference and establish uniformity on the masculine plan by implication proclaim the intrinsic (ontological) cussedness of femininity. The same goes, with regard to Africanity, for similar maneuvers on the part of Africans to establish uniformity on the Western plan. In an earlier essay I questioned (more briefly than I have done above) the usefulness or efficacy of Achebe’s and Ng觫's gambit of empowering women by symbolically making them into men, as in conferring a male status on Elewa’s female child, or making War««nga into a ninja and a gun-packing, lone-ranging, executioner. I referred to the strategy as ironic championship of women, whose message was that a woman could triumph only to the extent that she became manlike (1996: 141). It is, of course, consistent with the practice of some feminists, the more militant ones, who spare no effort in transforming themselves into men, in looks, in dressing, in behavior.
The ideological inconsistency of the practice is demonstrable with regard to cross-dressing. The practice is in certain instances a common and accepted phenomenon, whereas in others it raises eyebrows and strikes some as a form of perversion. The decisive factor in whether it is accepted or not is whether the cross-dresser is male or female. A woman may dress as a man, may wear pants and jackets, even ties, and yet be regarded as perfectly dressed, especially as a modern, “with it” woman. But a man who wears a frock, or skirt and blouse, and a shawl would be a transvestite, somewhat beyond the pale of normality. The inference is that it is alright for a woman to strive to become a man, but not the other way round, since transvestism, according to the general understanding, indicates the gender identity preference of the person who engages in it. The evidence of transvestism, and of the de rigeur affectation of masculinity on the part of “empowered” women is a contradictory tendency towards unisexism (or unigenderism) with a masculine stamp.
Buchi Emecheta is arguably Western feminism’s favorite African writer, and Marie Umeh describes her fifth novel, The Joys of Motherhood (1979) as her magnum opus (191). The title is profoundly ironic, for the story is that of a woman who, though she had several children, successful and promising, dies alone, destitute and demented by a roadside. The heroine Nnu Ego’s victimization by men began long before she was born, as she is in fact the reincarnation of a slave her father Nwokocha Agbadi and his sons had ritually murdered to accompany his dead wife, and their mother, to the next world. The slave had vowed to return to Agbadi’s household, not as a slave but as a legitimate daughter, in appreciation for his “kindness”: he had objected to one of his sons’ overzealousness in carrying out the killing.
Nnu Ego’s first marriage is childless, supposedly because of the dead slave girl’s revenge, but a second marriage after Nnu Ego’s chi has been propitiated proves fruitful. She bears seven children, three male and four female. Despite the author’s intentions the novel is susceptible to simplistic interpretations, for example as a demonstration of men’s disregard (even contempt) for women, and as proof that motherhood in African societies is yet another patriarchal enchainment of women. Umeh writes that at the novel’s end “Nnu Ego realizes that while nurturing children brought her status in Igbo society, it does not bring her personal fulfillment. Her life was marked with loneliness, poverty, and strife” (190). In fact Emecheta portrays a mother who enjoyed a good relationship with her children, and children who were solicitous of their mother. At the motor park in Lagos when she was about to depart finally for Ibuza, she waited for the arrival of her daughter Taiwo and her husband Magnus. The two approached, joking and laughing, and when they saw Nnu Ego Athey ran like schoolchildren towards her. Her cup of happiness was full. Yes, this was something. She was happy to see her children happy” (222). And they paid for her to ride with the driver in front, in first class as it was called, even though the fare is triple the regular fare.
She suffered mental deterioration after arriving home, but because she pined for her children:
It was not that she was physically poor; her daughters sent help once in a while. However, what actually broke her was, month after month, expecting to hear from her son in America, and from Adim too who later went to Canada, and failing to do so. It was rumours that she heard Oshia [in America] had married and that his bride was a white woman. (224).
Apparently more is involved here than patriarchal victimization, especially Nnu Ego’s inability to cope with what the new dispensation makes possible. Patriarchy has nothing to do with her sons’ departure for America and Canada, nor for Oshia’s marrying a white woman.
There is much in Emecheta’s novel to support Umeh’s thesis that it is meant to champion a woman’s right to sexual pleasure, a right that is not always conceded, and not only in African societies but in societies elsewhere. There is also enough in it to support the contention that she is ambivalent about motherhood, but hardly that she demonstrates that motherhood, like domesticity and oblivion, is a state to “sink into” (194). After all, the author is herself a mother. Umeh’s difficulty in her discussion of the novel is evident in the following indictment of Igbo society, which she attributes to Emecheta:
Igbo society, according to Joys, effaces female sexual desire and expressivity by subconsciously programming its female kith and kin to carry a “moral albatross” around their necks. To prevent female rebellion, which would lead to a complete disregard for tradition and the ways of the ancestors, various methods have been devised by patriarchy to control Igbo women’s sexuality: clitoridectomy, rape, incest, sexual deprivation, ostracization, fear, humiliation, and the psychological sexual blinding of women. Generally speaking, the only time a woman is regarded as being chaste and pure is when the sex act is performed by her husband for his recreation, and for her procreation. (191)
One can hear the Armah of Two Thousand Seasons in that passage, but at least he was writing fiction, and Umeh is offering scholarship. Moreover, it is difficult to reconcile the totalized idea of the sheepishly submissive Igbo women with Emecheta’s own testimony that among Igbo women were some who had “extra confidence and sauciness even in captivity,” a kind of “arrogance, which even captivity could not diminish”; and, furthermore, that some men were attracted to only such women. “To regard a woman who is quiet and timid as desirable was something that came . . . with Christianity and other changes” (1988: 10).
The foregoing is not to say, though, that Emecheta holds a sanguine view of the African family as an institution, any more than she does of African men. He definitive statement on the subject is in the novel she pointedly, and appropriately, titled The Family (1990). Ostensibly the story of the Brilliantines, a Jamaican family that moves to London, it is more like a survey of the African (or Black) family as a whole. In the main plot Winston rapes his daughter Gwendolen in London, his excuse being that they had been separated for some years during which period she had grown into a young woman who resembled her mother Sonia. When he discovers that she is not a virgin, because she had earlier been raped by Uncle Johnny in Granville, he flies into a rage, not because Uncle Johnny, who was in loco parentis for her, had so abused her but because Uncle Johnny had beaten him to her! In London Sonia befriends Gladys Odowis, a Nigerian woman married to Tunde Odowis, a wife batterer. Gladys takes her children and moves away from Tunde, but she cannot go back to Nigeria because of family pressures. She thus explains the pressures to Sonia, “I mean my husband’s people, they’re bound to make trouble. They would gladly interfere in my upbringing of the children . . . “ (65). Another Nigerian family in the book is that of Azu Ilochina, Winston’s friend and co-worker. He is a polygamist: he snuck into England with a young beautiful student, leaving his plain girl-friend Cecilia back in Nigeria. But he had impregnated Cecilia, whose identical male twins, when they were born, were their father’s spitting image. His mother made sure that she joined him in England, where she made life practically unlivable for him (101).
For good measure Emecheta throws in another West Indian family, that of James Allen. After Winston commits suicide Sonia embarks on an affair with James, until his wife surprises her in Stroud Green, knocks her false teeth out of her mouth, and warns her off her husband. The only viable family in the story is the one that comprises Gwendolen and her daughter by Winston. She names her Iyamide to signify, as she explains to Sonia, that “everything I ever wanted, warmth, security, comfort, is all here in a female form” (237).
The pervasiveness of the impulse to portray Africa as the most unhealthy continent on which to be a woman finds a powerful illustration in the United Nations’ periodic campaigns to rid Africa of the plague of violence against women. The campaigns are encouraged, of course, and justified by African women and their Western champions. During the 1998 campaign the Nigerian feminist Josephine Chukwuma gave an interview to the BBC, which was broadcast on Focus on Africa on July 31. She offered her interviewer instances in which men (husbands and boy-friends) poured acid on women out of jealousy—the woman concerned in each case had won a beauty contest, she was becoming more affluent than her man, or had committed some such offence. I have no doubt whatsoever that Chukwuma was reporting real occurrences, not things she made up, but I do question the impression her report and the BBC left with listeners, viz, that such incidents are characteristically and pervasively Nigerian or African.
I recall a media discussion a few years ago about occasional murders of wives by Brazilian husbands, usually high society husbands, whose wives had been involved in indiscretions. The murders were of international interest because they were in effect condoned as understandable, perhaps even justifiable, avenues for the “injured” men to save face. Also a report in a December 2000 issue of The New York Times focuses on the phenomenon of “dowry deaths” in Indian: women doused with kerosene and set ablaze by their husbands’ families for the wives’ families’ failure to make good on the dowries they promised on their daughters’ wedding. The report notes that other wifely failings sometimes triggered the attack, and sometimes lesser punishments like beatings; in any case the incidence was so high (6,975 cases in 1998) that laws are now on the books to prosecute offenders. Incidentally, in the case the report features, in which the attack was for wifely failings, it was the mother-in-law, not the husband, who doused the woman with kerosene and torched her. Furthermore, whereas any instance of the ancient practice of burying wives and domestic servants with dead husbands and masters will scandalize most Africans today, sati is still occurs occasionally in India, although it does not enjoy official sanction.
The point of my reference to those examples of violence against women in other parts of the world is not to argue that they make such violence permissible in Africa.
Such practices (as Chukwuma listed) must certainly be exposed and combated, along with other forms of violence against women, and abuse of women that arise out of outmoded and outrageous notions of the position of the woman vis-a-vis the man. But laudable though the UN initiative in Africa is, it is unfortunate because of its exclusive focus on, and confinement to, Africa, for it feeds the notion that only in Africa is violence against women a problem.
The tendency to ascribe gender contrariness to Africans and African institutions, even if inadvertently, surfaces in countless other ways. One example occurred in a discussion I had with the sympathetic scholar and educator Esther Goody on August 17, 2000 about chiefly hierarchies in Bole village in northern Ghana. A long resident of Bole, she had taken her visitors, including myself, on a courtesy visit to the king and his court, and afterwards had explained its constitution. The highest ranking chief, she said, was the senior chief on the mother’s side. In response to my surprise that the mother’s side was so favored she explained that since succession was through the father’s side the chiefs on the mother’s side posed no threat to the king. As far as she was concerned the arrangement was predicated on protecting the king from mischief by an ambitious and impatient claimant to the throne. Yet it positions the senior chief on the mother’s side as the closest person to the king (he stands closest to him on ceremonial occasions) and is his closest confidant. He is in the position, therefore, of greatest trust, and he is the person attack from whom the king is most exposed. Even if the chief is excluded from succession, he most certainly can plot with an eligible chief to use his proximity to the person of the king (physical and otherwise) to do him harm in the interest of the eligible chief, in hopes of some commensurate reward if and when the latter became king.
The cynical explanation should therefore be rethought. Is it not possible that the chief’s closeness is an expression of the belief that it is with the mother, and therefore with the mother’s side, that a person (including a king) is most safe? This is Achebe’s explanation in Things Fall Apart for Okonkwo’s seeking refuge in his mother’s village.
In addition to the unfair ascription of gender villainy to Africans and African institutions one notices a reluctance, inadvertent perhaps, to acknowledge African institutions and practices that are exemplary in recognizing and protecting the best interests of women. For example, in his Introduction to Chaka (1981) Daniel Kunene in clarifies the affair between Senzangakhona and Nandi by describing ho iketa, a Sesotho institution of which women in the modern Western world would approve. According to him, it is a practice that traditionally permitted African women to propose marriage to the men of their choice:
The Mosotho girl engages in totally non-verbal behaviour in which symbolic acts are performed, the most important of which consists in her going to the young man’s home and sitting outside the courtyards in a certain attitude, thus demanding that her presence be recognized and certain rituals performed by her hoped-for in-laws. (xxi)
Another instance in which tradition permits a woman to seize the initiative even against powerful patriarchs is the Shona bopoto, a public protest a woman stages if she has been wronged by a husband or some other powerful male in the household, her father-in-law for example (African Sunset 117B18). She sets up before the compound and makes angry noises until the elders of the community relieve her by arranging to hear her grievances.
Even more edifying and heartening is the bleak view Shona society, like others, hold of men who act disrespectfully towards their mothers. The nature of the penance the society imposes is better testimony to its regard for women than scholarly speculations. The offending man must atone, the society holds, or face grievous misfortune, including going insane. “Mothers are traditionally regarded as sacred in Shona culture. You can easily get away with assaulting your father but never your mother. If you have committed a crime against your mother, you must prove that you are genuinely sorry by performing specified purifying rituals” (African Sunset 143). This is especially the case if the mother dies before the son can ask forgiveness.
The man goes about wearing sackcloth and covered with ashes. He makes his rounds sitting by rubbish heaps, where people throw more ashes, pebbles, and sticks at him, jeer at him, and berate him for daring to insult his mother. They tie corn husks into a necklace and place it around his neck, then give him cold sadza to eat with salted water. Then they give him sorghum or maize, which he accepts in a sack he carries over his shoulders. He continues the routine until he has collected ten buckets of sorghum and three buckets of maize. He spends two days doing the woman’s job of grinding the sorghum, without assistance. He then prepares three drums of beer, after which he informs the elders that he is ready for the final cleansing ceremony. The entire village attends the ceremony, during which an ox is killed and eaten without salt, communal participation in the atonement. All that done, the offending son asks his mother’s spirit for forgiveness (African Sunset 142-45).
One can multiply examples that prove that even by today’s standards traditional African societies and cultures devised measures that attest to their enlightened attitude towards their female members. No one should be surprised by that “revelation,” inasmuch as social institutions and national cultures came into being at the behest of men and women together, and evolved through usage by both sexes (and genders). Moreover, several scholars have published studies that demonstrate, convincingly, that colonial policies severely attenuated or eliminated institutionalized mechanisms that traditionally guaranteed women’s effective and equitable participation in communal affairs, and at the same time institutionalized mechanisms that resulted in the “inferiorization” of women’s roles and status viz-a-viz men’s. Recent examples are in the essays in an earlier issue of West Africa Review devoted to gender matters. Among other things, these studies show that traditionally, African women were often quite independent of their spouses in one of the most important aspects of life, the economic: they traded and controlled the proceeds from their trade; they cultivated food crops and controlled their utilization. And independent women were most unlikely to submit to abuse at the hands of their husbands or the community at large, especially in the presence of quite powerful women’s organizations.
Yet even when scholars (including African scholars) acknowledge the feistiness of traditional women they sometimes fall prey to the attractiveness of the fiction that the feistiness came with European influence and Western education. Thus having lauded the Igbo woman, Nwanyeruwa of Oloko village; for inaugurating the 1929 women’s tax revolt, John N. Oriji goes on to give the credit to a Western-educated woman. Nwanyeruwa, he writes, “played a major role, not only in precipitating the revolt, but emerged as a leading advocate of non-violence during the protest marches. . . . It is also significant that women from Bende, Ngwa and other places rallied round Nwanyeruwa during the revolt . . .” (2000). In a later section of the article, with the title, “Heroine of the Revolt in Aba-Ngwa Area: The Power of Literacy” he attributes Madam Mary Okezie’s heroism to the fact that she was “the first Ngwa woman to gain Western education.” That fact enables her to supplant Nyanyeruwa, around whom Ngwa women (presumably including herself) rallied as the inaugurator and symbol of their revolt.
An unfortunate fact about scholarship is that it is often grounded, perhaps inevitably, in identity politics. That base can, to be sure, enhance the integrity of the scholarship with insiderist insight, but it can just as well detract from its value by infusing it with partisan distortions owing to insiderist lack of detachment and objectivity. Since no one, not even a scholar, is without some identity and its pull, what matters is that one remain conscious of it and aware of its potential effects on one’s perception. Discussing Foucault (a homosexual scholar) and Hanna Arendt (a Jewish scholar) on this issue Bell paraphrases their positions as follows: “For Arendt, ‘facts’ of one’s private identity offer nothing for a political engagement; nothing follows from identity . . . For Foucault, to participate politically according to one’s identity is to tie oneself to a subjectification that itself needs to be exposed” (Bell 95). I assume she means that nothing follows necessarily from identity. What is true in this regard for political engagement is equally true for scholarly analyses. Just as one’s politics should not be determined by one’s identity, so one’s scholarship should be independent of one’s identity. Here the intellectual, like the political, is separated from the personal: the personal, therefore, is not the intellectual, and is not the political.
Pursuing the foregoing line of thought, and in keeping with the trend of my argument on the representation of gender matters pertaining to traditional African societies, I wish to evoke Graham Burchell’s comments on what he calls “the ethics of intellectual work” and what it demands of the historian of the present, comments that apply equally to historians of the past. He suggests “a continuity between the genealogical approach as a kind of historico-transcendental criticism of actuality and the ethic of intellectual work as a kind of askesis [presumably a studied avoidance of all self-indulgence].” Both, he says, call for approaching the object of intellectual attention in a “non-identitarian” attitude that both effects a disarming of ready-made identities and nullifies their effects (31).
Because his cautions, especially with regard to “a concern for truth and a concern for existence” (31), apply so importantly to scholarly engagements with the African past and present I will quote him at length in conclusion:
Precisely because nothing is more historical than truth, the historian of the present must have concern for it, must be attentive to its different forms, must be curious about its real and possible transformations, must be meticulous in describing the shapes it assumes, must be accurate in the accounts he or she gives about it and must be willing to be disturbed or even changed by it.
One of the ways of approaching this concern for truth might be by way of the old question of value freedom. This theme implies that research must not be subservient to already-constituted value positions concerning what is good or bad. Previously held positions cannot dictate either the conclusions to be arrived at or the procedures of investigation adopted to determine what is or was the case. (31-32)
And in words that advocates of Western normativity would do well to heed Burchell goes on to observe that “it is not a matter of indifference that, at any given moment, this, rather than some other form of existence prevails. After all, the historian’s starting point is the non-necessity of what passes for necessary in our present. Historians of the present therefore have a concern for selectivity of what exists as a covering over of what might exist” (33).
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Armah, Ayi Kwei. Two Thousand Seasons. Oxford: Heinemann, 1979.
Bell, Vikki. AThe Promise of Liberalism and the Performance of Freedom.” Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government. Andrew Barry et al., eds. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1996, 81-97.
Burchell, Graham. “Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self.” Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberaliam and Rationalities of Government. Andrew Barry et al., eds. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp 19-36).
Dugger, Celia W. “Kerosene, Weapon of Choice for Attacks on Wives in India.” The New York Times. Tuesday, December 26, 2000, A1, A10.
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---------. The Family. New York: George Braziller, 1990.
Kunene, Daniel P. Introduction. Thomas Mofolo. Chaka. Oxford. Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1981, p. xxi.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross. London: Heinemann, 1987.
Nzegwu, Nkiru. “Chasing Shadows: The Misplaced Search for Matriarchy.” West Africa Review 2, 1 (2000).
Nzenza-Shand, Sekai. Songs to an African Sunset: A Zimbabwean Story. Melbourne: Lonely Planet Publications, 1997.
Oriji, John N. “Igbo Women From 1929-1960.” West Africa Review 2, 1 (2000).
Owomoyela, Oyekan. The African Difference: Discourses on Africanity and the Relativity of Cultures. Johannesburg: Witswatersrand University Press, and New York: Peter Lang, 1996.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Soyinka, Wole. “The Autistic Hunt: Or How to Marximise Mediocrity.” Art, Dialogue & Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture. Ibadan: New Horn Press, 1988.
Copyright 2002 Africa Resource Center, Inc.
Citation Format
Owomoyela, Oyekan (2002). DISCOURSE ON GENDER: HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY AND THE ETHICS OF INTELLECTUAL WORK. West Africa Reivew: 3, 2.