10 Situational Gender & Subversive Sex?

African Contributions to Feminist Theorizing (2007)

Woodcut by Wesa Maliva

201
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Since the 1980s, feminist thinking has been challenged by feminists of colour
and/or from post-colonial backgrounds. They have felt excluded from main-
stream feminist concerns, and conceptualizations with implicit points of depar-
ture in Western middle-class norms and lifestyles have been seen as irrelevant
or insufficient for understanding gender dynamics in different settings. This
critique has highlighted weak points and blind spots in mainstream feminist
thinking, paving the way for broader, more inclusive theorizing.
The particular focus in this chapter is on African contributions to feminist
theorizing, with a special interest in the ways in which African feminists have
taken African ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’ as points of departure for novel thinking
regarding men, women and gender. This interest is spurred by my own investi-
gations into gender relations in matrilineal northern Mozambique. My find-
ings here – or rather my puzzlements, meeting gender identities and gender
relations which did not fit my pre-conceived theoretical understandings – sent
me searching for reinterpretations of so-called ‘African tradition’ from feminist
points of view.

Re-mapping ‘African culture’

In much ethnographic research on Africa, and certainly in colonial and
missionary interventions, ‘African tradition’ is seen as patriarchal and woman
oppressive. This general approach has been extended into contemporary devel-
opment thinking, where notions of gender are often based on assumptions of
Africa as ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘behind’, and of ‘African tradition’ as inherently
patriarchal: cultures where women are perpetual minors, with little or no rights
of their own to land or property, and with little personal freedom.
Such assumptions are increasingly being questioned by African gender
scholars. They acknowledge that present gender relations of power in most
African contexts are patriarchal and male dominated – but they suggest a
different historical trajectory, compared to the mainstream notion of ‘African
women oppressed by traditional culture and harmful practices’. Rather than
seeing the roots of contemporary African patriarchal structures in ‘African
culture’, these scholars point to ‘the new and growing patriarchal systems
imposed on our societies through colonialism and Western religious and educa-
tional influences’ (Amadiume 1987, 9). In their eyes, much of what is claimed
by development agencies and by African leaders to be ‘traditional African
culture’ is in fact invented tradition. Where development discourse sees gender
oppression in the past and gender equality in the future, these feminists say:
No, this is not how things are. Gender oppression in its present form has been
imported to Africa from the West through colonialism and Christianity, and
from the East through Islam. Before these interventions, gender relations were
different, not oppressive – at least not in the same way – or maybe gender was
actually not very important? As far as gender goes, they say, the past cannot be
understood through the conceptual lens of present-day gender-and-
development thinking. The challenge is to understand the past in different ways,
in order to be able to point to new strategies for the future – to reconceptualize
the past, and ‘African culture-and-tradition’, from a gender point of view.

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 Situational Gender & Subversive Sex? 203

Reanalysing old ethnographic texts and criticizing the (generally white, male,
Christian) authors’ patriarchalizing interpretations of African societies,
scholars like Ifi Amadiume, Oyèrónke Oyewuùmí, Nkiru Nzegwu, Charmaine
Pereira, Sylvia Tamale and many others come up with alternative conceptual-
izations, which challenge not only colonial anthropology and development
discourse, but also Western feminist lines of thinking. Aspects of this critique
will be discussed below.
This chapter is divided into two sections. In the first section, I discuss ideas of
‘situational gender’. This is basically social constructionism taken further than
the well known Simone de Beauvoir dictum: ‘One is not born, but rather
becomes, a woman’ (de Beauvoir 1949/1997, 295)1. In this respect, I found
the thinking of Ifi Amadiume and Oyèrónké Oyewùmí particularly useful. They
both take a point of departure in pre-colonial Nigerian society (Igbo and Yoruba,
respectively) reinvestigating and reinterpreting the ways in which pre-colonial
social structures have been depicted by colonial anthropologists and others. As
a result of these investigations they claim that ‘gender’ is not a foundational
category, and that notions of gender are flexible and fluid, rooted in social posi-
tions, not in ‘biological sex’. I have dubbed this line of thinking ‘situational
gender’ in an attempt to stress the fact that in these conceptualizations, gender
differences are not rooted in bodies. Gender is volatile, changing, depending on
social relations; gender is given by the context, bodies are fitted in. This may
look like social constructionist thinking, well known from much contemporary
feminist theorizing, but it is more radical, going beyond male/female bodies.
According to Oyewùmí, Western feminist claims to social constructionism
cannot be taken seriously. How can they subscribe to social constructionism, she
asks, and still take their point of departure in fixed man/woman binary hierar-
chical oppositions? Following social constructionist thinking, matters of power
and subordination should be investigated, not assumed. However, in Oyewùmí’s
view, bodies, a priori categorized as either male or female, are far too promi-
nently placed in Western feminist thought. She criticizes Western somatocen-
tricity, or body-reasoning, as she calls it (Oyewùmí 1997, 5). ‘Situational
gender’ means gender ad hoc, delinked from bodies, depending on social rela-
tions.
I have called the second section ‘subversive sex’ on inspiration from Sylvia
Tamale. Summing up a paper given in 2005 at a conference in Gothenburg,
Sweden, she said:
While women’s gendered bodies and sexualities constitute a crucial target for main-
taining their subordination, they paradoxically also form an important tool in the
informal systems of negotiating structures and systems of inequality. As women navi-
gate through the maze of gender politics, reclaiming their bodily integrity and
autonomy, they engage a variety of tools ranging from subtle sexuality and eroticism
to unrestricted subversive sexuality, from passive to assertive. (Tamale 2005a, 18)
The notion of ‘subversive sex’ offers an entry point for talking about sexualities
from women’s (and in some cases also from men’s) points of view, rather than

1
This quote from The Second Sex actually does not match major lines of thinking in Simone de Beau-
voir’s work. Generally in The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir sees women’s cultural roles as linked
to women’s bodies, see Chapter 4.

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 204 II Night of the Women, Day of the Men

from a position which reduces women to sexual objects. Sexuality studies is a

fairly recent phenomenon in the context of African feminist writings. Sylvia
Tamale is one of the pioneers, and according to her, it is the HIV/AIDS pandemic
which has ‘flung open the doors on sexuality. In particular, it has forced into the
open the myths and secrets in relationships and identities that are often silenced
or taken for granted’ (Tamale 2005a). African feminists show that marriage
and sexuality are not necessarily interlinked in the ways the Bible and African
patriarchs preach, and that same-sex practices, far from being a Western
import, as alleged by homophobic African leaders, have existed under specific
circumstances in pre-colonial societies all over the continent. As pointed out
by Jessica Horn:
Homophobia is less an ‘African’ tradition than a patriarchal tradition that has been
hijacked into local cultural discourse. … What is bemusing is that moral condemna-
tion and persecution of non-heteronormative behavior is often supported by allusion
to two texts: laws criminalizing ‘unnatural’ sex and the Bible. Both were introduced
via European colonization of Africa, and in the case of the latter, carried in again by
a new wave of US-driven Pentecostal evangelism. (Horn 2006, 13)

Section 1: Situational gender

Ifi Amadiume (1987) and Oyèrónké Oyewùmí (1997) both make the point that
gender is not a foundational category in many African contexts. Male and
female are relational categories, depending on social positions. Often, but not
always, female positions will be occupied by women, male positions by men.
Amadiume talks of ‘the flexibility of Igbo gender construction’ which implies
that daughters can become sons, and consequently male, just as women can
marry wives and thus become husbands – i.e., male in relation to their wives
(Amadiume 1987, 15). ‘In Igbo grammatical construction of gender, a neuter
particle is used in Igbo subject or object pronouns, so that no gender distinc-
tion is made in reference to males and females in writing or in speech. There is,
therefore, no language or mental adjustment or confusion in reference to a
woman performing a typical male role’ (ibid., 17). Gender is located in social
positions, not in bodies per se.
‘The flexibility of Igbo gender construction meant that gender was separate
from biological sex.’ (ibid., 15). Oyéwùmí makes a similar point when she says
that what was important in Yoruba society were not bodily characteristics (e.g.,
as man or woman) but social positionings, which are always relative and situ-
ational. ‘From a Yorùbá stance, the body appears to have an exaggerated pres-
ence in Western thought and social practice, including feminist theories. …
The principle that determined social organization was seniority, which was
based on chronological age. Yorùbá kinship terms did not denote gender, and
other non-familial social categories were not gender-specific either’ (Oyewùmí
1997: 13). Molara Ogundipe joins the critique of fixed and binary gender cate-
gorizations: ‘We need to move away from the dichotomous evaluation of the
woman’s identity in diametrical opposition to a man’s that occurs in Western
studies. We need more refined and perceptive analytical tools’ (Lewis/
Ogundipe, 2002). The Western male/female opposition based on interpreta-

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 Situational Gender & Subversive Sex? 205

tions of bodies as either male or female works as a mental block to further

insight.
According to Oyewùmí, even if Western thinking declares itself not to be
embodied (cf. the Cartesian notion of a disembodied mind), embodied is exactly
what it is, all the time. Similarly, Western feminists busily criticizing Freud’s
dictum that anatomy is destiny (when it comes to women), are themselves
thinking along those very lines. In Western dichotomous male/female thinking,
womanhood is inescapably linked to bodies. The sex/gender distinction was
introduced into feminist thought exactly in order to argue the point that
gendered destinies are socially constructed and not bodily determined, but
mainstream Western feminism has not managed to disentangle itself from
bodies being interpreted as either male or female. Thus, according to Oyewùmí,
‘the distinction between sex and gender is a red herring’ (1997, 9). ‘Despite the
pre-eminence of feminist social constructionism, which claims a social deter-
ministic approach to society, biological foundationalism, if not reductionism, is
still at the center of gender discourses, just as it is at the center of all other
discussions of society in the West,’ Oyewùmí says (ibid.).

The concept of ‘woman’ overloaded with implications

Another recurrent point of critique focuses on the concept of ‘woman’. What
does it mean? What is implied when one talks of somebody as a ‘woman’?
Which are the dangers of generalized, universal, cross-cultural conceptions of
womanhood?
Oyèrónké Oyewùmí confused her readers and sent waves of shock through
African intellectual circles – feminist and non-feminist – when in her 1997
book she declared that ‘the fundamental category “woman” – which is foun-
dational in Western gender discourses – simply did not exist in Yorùbáland prior
to its sustained contact with the West’ (Oyewùmí 1997, ix). From Oyewùmí’s
point of view, the very concept of ‘woman’ in Western thinking is so overloaded
with implications and associations which are irrelevant and disturbing in
African contexts, that analysis with ‘woman’ as a conceptual tool inevitably
will lead investigations off on wrong tracks, at the same time as important
aspects of the subject matter remain unseen.
Judith Butler also criticizes the concept of “woman”, but from a different
point of view. ‘To what extent,’ she asks, ‘does the category of woman achieve
stability and coherence only in the context of the heterosexual matrix?’ (Butler
1990, 9). The ’heterosexual matrix’ in turn is closely linked to presumptions
regarding a male/female binary, ‘a hegemonic discursive /epistemic model of
gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense
there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender … that is opposi-
tionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of hetero-
sexuality’ (Butler 1990, 194).
‘Woman’ as understood in the context of Second Wave feminism is not only
in relation to a heterosexual matrix, but also in relation to a notion of a
universal patriarchy, producing ’the universal subordination of women’.
Writing in 1990, Butler is critical of this idea: ‘The notion of universal patri-
archy has been widely criticized in recent years for its failure to account for the
workings of gender oppression in the concrete cultural contexts in which it

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exists’ (Butler 1990, 6). However, she says, that ‘although the notion of
universal patriarchy no longer enjoys the kind of credibility it once did, the
notion of a generally shared conception of ‘women’ the corollary to that frame-
work, has been much more difficult to displace’ (ibid., 7). Such destabilization
is, however, according to Butler, an important challenge for contemporary femi-
nism: ‘To trace the political operations that produce and conceal what qualifies
as the juridical subject of feminism is precisely the task of a feminist genealogy
of the category of women’ (ibid., 9, author’s emphasis).
As I see it, Amadiume and Oyewùmí are meeting this challenge in their crit-
ical probing of the concept of ‘woman’ in African contexts. Seen from
Oyewùmí’s vantage point, a whole series of ideas – among these, first and fore-
most, the idea of ‘universal subordination’ – is embedded in the concept of
‘woman’ (1997: xii). This is what she is hinting at when she says that ‘the
woman in feminist theory, is a wife’ (Oyéwùmí 2000, 1094). In Yoruba as well
as in Igbo contexts, a position as wife is a subordinate position. But ‘women’
are more than wives, and not all ‘wives’ are women. In actual fact, across Africa,
the category generally translated as ‘wife’ is often not gender specific, but it does
indicate relations of subordination (Amadiume 1987, 90; Oyewùmí 2000,
1096). The distinction between Yoruba terms oko and iyawo (usually translated
as ‘husband’ and ‘wife’) is not one of gender; it is a distinction between those
who are birth members of a family/a lineage and those who enter by marriage
(Oyewùmí 2002, 4). In a matrilineal society, any married man will be a ‘wife’
in this sense. The relation of subordination is conditioned by being insider vs
outsider to the lineage; it is not conditioned by gender. If ‘wives’ are subordi-
nated – as is frequently the case – this subordination is linked to the position as
outsiders to the lineage, not to sex/gender per se. In patrilineal contexts, the
women who are daughters of the lineage will often have different (and more
privileged) positions, compared to the women who join the lineage as wives. In
Emakhuwa – the language of the major population group in matrilineal
northern Mozambique – the term for the person we would see as a ‘father’ liter-
ally translates into ‘male stranger married into the lineage’.

Deprioritizing gender
Yet another line of criticism of Western gender-thinking is a critique of the
automatic priority often given to gender in front of other structures of (possible)
subordination, such as race, class and age. Ifi Amadiume, in the fierce critique
of colonial anthropology and Western feminism, which prefaces her 1987 book:
Male Daughters, Female Husbands, points out that Western feminism – at least
until the mid-1980s – persisted in foregrounding gender, and remained blind to
race (Amadiume 1987, 3). Indian feminist Chandra Mohanty makes a similar
point: ‘The universality of gender oppression is problematic, based as it is on
the assumption that the categories of race and class have to be invisible for the
category of gender to be visible’ (Mohanty 2003, 107). Further along these
lines, Mohanty also criticizes the Second Wave notion of Global Sisterhood (cf.
Robin Morgan 1984):
Universal sisterhood defined as the transcendence of the ‘male’ world thus ends up
being a middle-class, psychologized notion that effectively erases material and ideo-
logical power differences within and among groups of women, especially between

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 Situational Gender & Subversive Sex? 207

first and third world women … In Morgan’s text cross-cultural comparisons are based
the assumption of the singularity and homogeneity of women as a group. This homo-
geneity of women as a group is, in turn, predicated on a definition of the experience
of oppression where difference can only be understood as male/female. (Mohanty
1993, 112, 116)
The concept of intersectionality was introduced into feminist studies in order to
make it clear that gender relations of power will always be mediated and condi-
tioned by other dimensions of power along the lines of, for example, race, class,
and age. Even so, in Western feminist analysis, and also in development work,
dichotomous notions of male/female will often prevail or be given priority.

Reconceptualizing motherhood: the wife/mother distinction

A further point of divergence and critique pertains to the concept of mother-
hood. In Ifi Amadiume’s anger and disappointment vis-à-vis classical anthro-
pology as well as Western feminism, with which she was confronted as a young
student in England in the 1970s, the anthropological and feminist lack of
understanding of African motherhood looms large: ‘At no period in the history
of the patriarchal cultures of Europe has motherhood been accorded the same
status and reverence as it has had in African cultures’ (1987, 3). Ifi Amadiume
shows that even in patrilineal Igbo societies, the mother-focused matricentric
unit of mother and children has great importance; the relation to one’s mother
and to one’s maternal siblings – ‘children of the same womb’ – are the closest
kinship bonds. This is a general phenomenon, across many African cultures
(Amadiume 1997, 19). According to Amadiume, a major reason that the
centrality of motherhood has not been acknowledged is the racialized and patri-
archalizing gaze of (Western) observers, men as well as women, anthropolo-
gists as well as feminists.
The problem for Western feminists in acknowledging motherhood as a locus
of power and autonomy is that in the patriarchal societies of the West, moth-
erhood has been linked unilaterally to wifehood, cf. the concept of ‘illegitimate
children’ if the mother is not a wife. In Africa, motherhood and wifehood are not
linked in this way. On the contrary, a mother is a central person, and mother-
child ties are crucial:
In all African family arrangements, the most important ties within the family flow
from the mother, whatever the norms of marriage residence. These ties link the
mother to the child and connect the children of the same mother in bonds that are
conceived as natural and unbreakable. … The idea that mothers are powerful is very
much a defining characteristic of the institution and its place in society. (Oyewùmí
2000, 1097).
The mother is the pivot around which familial relationships are delineated and
organized. (Oyewùmí 2002, 5)
Amadiume tries to capture this in formulations like ‘the logic of motherhood’
and ‘the motherhood paradigm’. Her point, by talking of the motherhood para-
digm, is to raise awareness regarding the often implicit patriarchal paradigm in
social science: ‘The recognition of the motherhood paradigm means that we
do not take patriarchy as given, or as a paradigm’ (1997, 21). In ‘the mother-
hood paradigm’ the focus is not on ‘women’ as such, but on the mother-child
relationship. Amadiume proposes an analytical model which is shifting between

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the obi, the male-focused ancestral house, on one hand, and the mpuke, the
mother-focused matri-centric unit at the other (ibid., 71). In doing so she decen-
tres the male subject, moving the focus not to a female subject, but to a social
relationship.
Thus, where subordination is embedded is in this positioning as an in-married
wife, not in being a woman as such. Motherhood, in an African context, is
certainly something different from wifehood. Where the position as wife denotes
subordination, the position as mother denotes power. When Western women see
subordination also in motherhood, this is because in Western patriarchal soci-
eties, the ban on motherhood outside marriage – motherhood independently of
wifehood – has been quite fiercely policed. In fact, it is only in the most recent
decades that, even in enlightened and presumedly gender-equal Scandinavian
societies, unmarried motherhood has ceased to carry a stigma. According to
Oyewùmí (and I agree), this implicit link in patrilineal/patriarchal settings
between ‘motherhood’ and ’wifehood’ has not been sufficiently challenged:
‘Within the feminist literature, motherhood, which in many other societies
constitutes the dominant identity of women, is subsumed under wifehood’
(Oyewùmí 2002, 4). This is the reason why for Oyewùmí, ‘wife’ is the relevant
concept with which to characterize the ‘universally subordinated woman’ of
Western feminism. In the specific patrilineal/patriarchal settings of the West,
wifehood and womanhood tend to overlap, but conceptual separation is impor-
tant: subordination is linked to wifehood conditioned by patriarchal marriage,
not to womanhood as such. In African settings, the possibility of motherhood
(social and/or biological motherhood) is not necessarily linked to wifehood. You
can be a mother without being a wife – an option which (under present condi-
tions of distress) is chosen by an increasing number of African women. While
wifehood in many African contexts indicates subordination, the position as a
mother is central and respected, in patri- as well as in matrilineal settings.

Summing up ‘Situational gender’

I find the theoretical contributions of Ifi Amadiume, Oyèrónké Oyewùmí and
other African feminists inspiring and eye-opening regarding limitations and
blind spots in much Western feminist thinking, including my own. In the discus-
sion above, I have focused on my own points of fascination, paying less atten-
tion to flaws and limitations in their thinking. Amadiume can, however, be
criticized for essentializing African-ness; while she is undermining gender
dichotomies, she is constructing other dichotomies between ‘Africans’ and
‘Europeans’ (cf eg Amadiume 1997, 110). They have both – Oyewùmí in partic-
ular – been criticized for drawing conclusions from language to social struc-
tures (Bakare-Yusuf 2004, Matory 2005) and for creating a nostalgic image of
an ideal past (e.g. Matory 2005). Parts of this critique I find justified, parts of
it I don’t. For example: Oyewùmí does not hide the fact that social relations in
pre-colonial Yorubaland were indeed hierarchical – only not particularly along
gender lines.
From the way in which I write about Amadiume and Oyewùmí, one might
suppose they were collaborating. This is not at all the case. Even if Amadiume
wrote her Male Husbands, Female Daughters in 1987, ten years before Oyewùmí’s
The Invention of Women (1997), there is hardly a reference to Amadiume in

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 Situational Gender & Subversive Sex? 209

Oyewùmí’s book. Oyewùmí has been criticized by other African feminists for
pretending to have invented it all herself, not acknowledging or misrepresenting
the work of her predecessors. In a panel debate at the African Studies Associa-
tion meeting in Washington 2002, chaired by Molara Ogundipe, the critique of
Oyewùmí from African feminists was massive; ironically Oyewùmí’s work was
more welcomed by Nigerian male scholars participating in the debate than by
the African women present. The Nigerian men seemed to be happy that
Oyewùmí emphasized the non-hierarchical character of Yoruba gender rela-
tions, thus absolving them (they felt) from the general feminist critique of their
patriarchal scholarship and style. In spite of the critique, however, I insist on the
illuminating aspects of the thinking of both Amadiume and Oyewùmí. Where
Amadiume as an anthropologist, writes in dialogue with anthropological schol-
arship, Oyewùmí, trained as a sociologist, has the profile of a gender scholar,
challenging feminist thinking in a more direct way. Reading the works of them
both has helped me to put critical question marks to my own thinking, and to
be more open minded than I would otherwise have been, trying out new inter-
pretations of unexpected empirical findings.
I also find it interesting that certain lines of this thinking run parallel to the
work of Judith Butler – without much direct connection, as it seems.2 What
these authors have in common is that they approach Second Wave feminist
ideas from subject positions different to those of white heterosexual middle class
women. Part of Butler’s motivation for critique is the marginalization and
‘othering’ of persons with different sexual orientations (LGBT, queer, etc.) in
Second Wave feminism. Similarly, Amadiume’s and Oyewùmí’s motivation is
the marginalization and ‘othering’ of non-Western women. The similarities
and differences in these positions are reflected in the resulting theorizations.
As an example, ‘sexual orientation’ is not featured at all in Amadiume’s and
Oyewùmí’s work3 – and issues of motherhood are absent in Butler’s work.

Section 2: Subversive sex?

Sexuality has for a long time been a no-go area in African feminist thinking
(Arnfred 2004b). Over the last few years, this situation has changed, presum-
ably, as suggested by Tamale, provoked by the new interest in sexuality caused
by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Since everybody is now anyhow digging into
‘African sexuality,’ Africa feminists cannot leave this entire field to external
investigation – and concomitant misunderstandings. In recent years, the
African feminist body of writing on sexualities has been rapidly expanding. The
South African feminist journal Agenda has published a series of issues on sexu-
alities (issues 62, 63 and 67, 2004–2006), and the pan-African feminist
journal Feminist Africa (edited from the African Gender Institute, Cape Town)

2
Amadiume’s first book Male Daughters, Female Husbands from 1987, precedes Butler’s first impor-
tant book, Gender Trouble, from 1990. Oyewùmí in her first book, The Invention of Women (1997)
refers to Judith Butler only once (regarding critique of the sex/gender distinction).
3
On the contrary Amadiume earns a rebuke from Saskia Wieringa and Evelyn Blackwood for
strongly denouncing the idea that the institution of female husbands in Igboland should have
anything to do with lesbianism (see Wieringa and Blackwood 1999, 4).

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has published two special issues on sexualities, issues 5 (on Sexual Cultures)
and 6 (on Subaltern Sexualities) in 2005 and 2006, respectively.
In African gender scholarship, sexualities have been first and most extensively
debated in terms of masculinities and in terms of (male) same-sex relations,
particularly in southern Africa (cf. e.g. Murray and Roscoe 1998, Morrell 2001,
Reid and Walker 2005, Morrell and Ouzgane 2005). But work on female sexu-
alities is emerging. An exciting field of feminist scholarship is opening up with
great promise of reconceptualization, which may be useful also beyond Africa.
As was the case of the concept of ‘woman’, which had to be deconstructed in
order to get rid of pre-given assumptions of little relevance for social analysis in
African contexts, also the notion of sexuality, particularly female sexuality, calls
for deconstruction. For example, often in studies of women’s conditions in Africa,
sexuality and fertility have been conflated, both presumed to be under male
control in the context of marriage. Patriarchal religions, including Christianity
and Islam, have done nothing to destabilize this conflation, since male control
of female sexuality and fertility are crucial prerequisites for patriarchal power.
An African feminist take on sexuality, which I have found most striking,
follows lines of thinking from the ‘situational gender’ critique of colonial
anthropological misunderstandings, and of shallow universalized gender-and-
development conceptualizations. As noted in the discussion of the wife/mother
distinction above, the critique of the centrality of marriage for the under-
standing of women’s lives looms large when the focus is on sexuality. Did
marriage actually control sexuality in pre-colonial Nigeria for example? Or was
marriage more an institution through which children would be allocated to
certain lineages? What are the implications of woman-woman marriages seen
in this perspective? And, focusing on sexuality on its own, does it make sense to
make an analytical distinction between sex for pleasure and sex for procreation?
Where do same-sex practices fit in, and how should they be understood?
These are some of the questions which have been grappled with in this more
recent work, much of which is based on reinterpretations of African ‘culture’
and ‘tradition’. In the following pages, I discuss selected contributions to this
growing body of work. I focus on notions of female sexuality as active and
assertive, and thus potentially ‘subversive’ in relation to certain moralist
social/cultural/religious norms.

Subversive transmarital sex

Nkiru Nzegwu’s 2006 analysis of what she calls ‘transmarital sex’ – trans-
marital in the sense that sexual relations go beyond marriage – belong to the line
of scholarship which reinterprets ‘African culture’ from feminist points of view.
In a critical analysis of Igbo patriliny, she shows that even if patrilineal kinship
systems are supposed to be based on patrilineal bloodlines, with husbands as
biological fathers to offspring produced by their wives, such is not necessarily the
case. Certainly according to the norms of Christian monogamous marriage,
sexuality as well as offspring are supposed to be controlled by the institution of
marriage4 – but again, realities in Africa (and presumably elsewhere) prove

4
The Ten Commandments, pillars of Christianity, state that adultery is not allowed; sex outside
marriage and procreation is an issue of morality and sin, female sexuality in particular.

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 Situational Gender & Subversive Sex? 211

otherwise. Like Tamale, Nzegwu contributes to debunking the image of ‘African

women as helpless victims of oppressive patriarchal systems’, showing how
patriliny and patriarchy have been undermined and subverted all along by the
sexual autonomy of wives. Marriage regulates offspring, yes, but not sexuality.
Nzegwu reports from Igboland, Nigeria, how previously Igbo women engaged
in transmarital relationships. Often these relationships would be tolerated by
the community, for example when one of the following circumstances would
apply (the list is remarkably long):
when for professional reasons spouses, such as Awka blacksmiths and Nri ritual
specialists, undertook journeys that kept them away from their conjugal units for
months on end; when a wife married other wives and the male genitor was not the
husband (male) of the husband (female); when a husband had difficulties producing
sons and a wife had relations with a man known to have a propensity for having sons;
when the wife in the previous example of a woman-woman marriage, in turn,
married her own wife; when a groom died without the birth of a male child to
continue his line, and the widow selected a paramour with whom to produce an heir
and continue the line; when young widows with little children chose to have more
children in their husbands’ name; when the groom was impotent and was unable to
father a child, and the aid of an obliging male surrogate was elicited; when the mother
of an infant male child married a mature woman for her son and the wife engaged in
sexual relations with paramours; when pregnancy did not occur within one year of
marriage, and the wife returned to her natal home for ‘medicinal treatment’ that
included sexual liaisons with other male partners; when a bride conceived between the
post-uri and pre-ina uno period [i.e. the period between engagement and the formal
relocation of the bride to her marital home] and arrived pregnant to her marital home;
when a much older husband is unable to satisfy the sexual needs of a much younger
wife and the wife elicits the services of a husband helper; when a spouse was mentally
unbalanced and sexual relations were ruled out for the safety of the wife; when there
were ritualized grounds for a bride or a wife to take on a lover and she exercised that
right; when there was a desired physical trait that a wife or the couple saw in some
man and wanted to bring the traits into their conjugal unit; and lastly when couples
were estranged, but not yet formally separated, and the wife engaged in sexual rela-
tionship with other partners. (Nzegwu 2006, 45–6)
The point here is that, according to Igbo norms, ‘the question of which pater
constituted the line of descent was irrelevant because the collective view was
that a husband of a bride is the father of the wife’s children, regardless of how
they were begotten’ (Nzegwu 2004, 7). Similar arrangements are reported from
elsewhere in Africa. Obviously in this situation, even married women command
quite a measure of sexual autonomy. Often, transmarital sexual liaisons would
be tolerated, even when they were not entered into for issues of procreation,
but rather for sexual pleasure. Particularly in such cases relations should be
conducted with a certain level of discretion. According to recent research, in
colonial Zululand, married women’s secret lovers were called isidikiselo, ‘top of
the pot’, while name for the lawful husband would be ibhodwe, ‘the main pot’
(Hunter 2003, 15).
The above accounts are rendered in the past tense, because the steep increase
in fundamentalist Christian churches – in Nigeria as well as elsewhere in Africa
– is changing social norms in patriarchalizing ways. Nevertheless, it is impor-
tant to realize that subversive sexuality, in terms of female sexuality not
conforming to Christian and patrilineal/patriarchal norms, has been prevalent

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 212 II Night of the Women, Day of the Men

until fairly recently. As for parts of Africa where contemporary culture is domi-
nated by Islam, also here changes have occurred from more permissive to more
restrictive attitudes vis a vis female sexuality. In Islam, both men’s and women’s
sexuality are seen as naturally active, but ‘women are thought to have a greater
potential for sexual desire and pleasure, nine times that of men’ (Ayesha Imam,
quoted in Chi-Chi Undie and Kabwe Benaya 2005). In recent times, however,
Sharia law has been known to come down heavily on women who have been
known to exercise that sexuality out of wedlock, cf. the Amina Lawal case in
northern Nigeria 2002–2003.

Same-sex relations as subversive

One African president after another has declared same-sex relations un-African
(Ratele 2005, 34) – which in a sense makes such relations, when they are prac-
tised, subversive vis a vis state ideologies. Along the same lines, the perform-
ance in Kampala of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues was banned early 2005 by
state authorities, claiming that the Monologues ‘promoted and glorified acts
such as lesbianism and homosexuality’ and that ‘a stand against foreign influ-
ences undermining Africa’s traditional values and culture should be taken’
(Arac de Nyeko 2005, 100). Sylvia Tamale provides a long list of research refer-
ences testifying to a history of various forms of same-sex relations in Uganda.
‘Trends both in the present and in the past reveal that it is time for Africans to
bury the tired myth that homosexuality is ‘unAfrican’. … Ironically, it is the
dominant Judaeo-Christian and Arabic religions upon which most Africa anti-
homosexuality proponents rely, that are foreign imports’ (Tamale 2003, 1).
Same-sex relations are considered subversive not only in relation to state
power, but also in relation to patriarchal power. ‘What is particularly threat-
ening to patriarchy is the idea of intimate same-sex relationships where a domi-
nating male is absent, and where women’s sexuality can be defined without
reference to reproduction,’ Tamale says. ‘Sexuality therefore becomes a critical
site for maintaining patriarchy and reproducing women’s oppression’ (ibid., 2).
Analyzing gay/lesbian kuchu culture in Uganda, she underscores the impor-
tance of sub-cultural identification: ‘Because homosexuals in Uganda do not
feel a sense of belonging to the dominant culture, they have had to reconstruct
affirming identities for themselves. … The self-definition of lesbians and gays …
involves their subversive performance and statement-making as gender outlaws
in society’ (ibid., 2). Importantly, Tamale also notes that in spite of implicit
lesbian critique of patriarchal gender power relations ‘the kuchu subculture
among Ugandan lesbians is entirely disconnected from the women’s movement’
(ibid., 2). ‘Many of us in the women’s movement,’ Tamale says, ‘still find it diffi-
cult to rid our consciousness of the “taboo web” that dims our understanding
of the intrinsic link between sexuality and women’s oppression and subordi-
nation’ (ibid., 2). However, ‘the process of disentanglement has begun’ mainly
caused by the HIV/AIDS pandemic which has forced gender activists and
scholars to reflect on issues of sexuality.
For a long time, same-sex relations in Africa, particularly female same-sex
relations, were hidden from the view of missionaries and anthropologists, partly
because they were not classified as ‘sex’, and partly because they were not
perceived as identities, but rather as practices, irrelevant to marriage and Chris-

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 Situational Gender & Subversive Sex? 213

tian/Muslim morality. A point of departure for African feminist analysis of

female same-sex relations has been provided by Kendall’s work from Lesotho,
first published in Murray and Roscoe (1998), and later in Blackwood and
Wieringa (1999). Kendall reports from Lesotho how sex is understood as what
men have – with women or with each other (1999, 164). The suggestion that
two women should ‘share the blankets with each other’ (the Lesotho euphe-
mism for having sex) was perceived as uproariously funny: ‘It’s impossible for
two women to share the blankets’ Kendall was told, ‘you cannot have sex unless
somebody has a koai (penis)’ (ibid., 162). Similarly ’No koai, no sex means that
women’s ways of expressing love, lust, passion, or joy in each other are neither
immoral nor suspect’ (ibid., 167). They hardly exist, escaping the gaze of
morality and of science. In his discussion of ‘Proper sex, bodies, culture and
objectification’ Ratele says:
A practice of sex as what happens between male and female was turned by dominant
science into something dictated by nature’s laws, something given by the constitu-
tion of the sexes. In other words, here as elsewhere, one could not call what happens
between two women sex, just as one was disallowed from seeing what happens
between two males as natural, just as one was persuaded that only a male organ pene-
trating a female organ is sexually and scientifically ‘normal’. (Ratele 2005, 36)
Further, and importantly in many contexts, until recently, these relationships
were not alternatives to marriage, but supplementary (cf. ‘the top of the pot’).
‘There is no tradition in Lesotho that permits or condones women or men
remaining single; single persons are regarded as anomalous and tragic. … A
respectable adult is a married adult’ (Kendall 1999, 163). However, the kuchu
culture described by Tamale is obviously a different, presumably more ‘modern’,
phenomenon. Gay and lesbian associations, based on acknowledgement of
gay/lesbian identities are gaining ground in Africa, in a movement initially
dominated by white Africans (e.g. in South Africa and in Zimbabwe), but such
is no longer the case. By now, several gay/lesbian organizations have been estab-
lished outside South Africa and Zimbabwe, such as for example the Coalition of
African Lesbians (CAL)5 in Namibia.

The power of the erotic

‘The erotic as power’ is a quote from Audre Lorde (1984, 53). In Lorde’s under-
standing, ‘the erotic’ is an inherently subversive force, a source of mobilization
against oppression: ‘In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt
and distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed
that can provide energy for change. For women this has meant a suppression
of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives’
(ibid.). Audre Lorde is/was an African-American feminist (and a lesbian). She
died in 1992.
‘The erotic as power’ may be structured differently in African contexts. Never-
theless, Patricia McFadden argues forcefully for the power of the erotic along the
lines of Audre Lorde:
As women from every walk of life we have the resources, the knowledge, the insight
and the political acumen to reassert our ownership of the problems and challenges
5
See www.mask.org.za

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 214 II Night of the Women, Day of the Men

generated by the virulent combination of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and misogynist

violation. By reclaiming our sexual energy and power, we can discover reservoirs of
personal and political courage that can equip us to envisage and to fight for what lies
beyond the prison of life-threatening and oppressive social systems and circum-
stances. Audre Lorde conceptualized this vital link between political power and deep
inner strength when she made her celebrated claim that it is only as self-loving indi-
viduals that we are able to reach into our depths and find the power within us.
(McFadden 2003, 1)

This force is necessary, McFadden says, in order to counteract the dominant

trends of present times, with the HIV/AIDS pandemic having generated ‘a
powerful resurgence of patriarchal dominance. … Without a discourse that
enables women to step beyond the bounded, limited notions of sexuality as being
either tied to reproduction or to the avoidance of disease or violation, we cannot
begin to imagine ourselves in new and profoundly life-transforming ways (ibid.,
5).
Strangely, however, McFadden’s argument is based on assumptions of ‘the
systematic suppression of women’s sexual and erotic inclinations’ (ibid., 1) and
of dominant constructions of women’s sexuality as ‘’bad’, ‘filthy’ and ‘morally
corrupting’’ (ibid., 2). These assumptions are questioned by Charmaine Pereira
in her reflections on and response to McFadden’s paper. Pereira shows how
McFadden’s assumptions as quoted above are rooted in ideas of ‘the universal
subordination of women,’ including a generalized notion of ‘African women’.
‘There is no suggestion in McFadden’s article that African women’s sexualities
may vary across space and time and across regions’ Pereira says. Most impor-
tantly she shows how ‘it is possible to argue for the need to enhance the value
of female sexuality and to promote basic sexual freedoms without assuming the
universal suppression of female sexualities’ (Pereira 2003, 1, emphasis added,
SA). According to Pereira, the notion that sexuality is ‘bad’ or ‘filthy’ is a rela-
tively recent phenomenon, which has been introduced to Africa through colo-
nialism and Victorian interpretations of Christianity. In the religious doctrines
of Islam, Pereira says, women’s sexuality is viewed as a powerful force that needs
to be controlled, rather than as derogatively ‘dirty’.
Pereira goes on to quote research from different African locations, showing
women’s sexual autonomy and initiative. Thus, based on such information it
does seem as if ‘the power of the erotic’ would be more within reach in certain
African locations compared to many other places – in spite of current setbacks
caused by HIV/AIDS, emerging patriarchal cultures, etc. Regarding the need
for visions and imaginations beyond patriarchal images of/restrictions on
female (and male) sexualities, Pereira and McFadden do not disagree. In another
paper, Charmaine Pereira writes about feminist futures and the necessity of
vision and imagination:
It seems to me that there is an intimate connection between what it is possible to know
and what we dare to imagine. There is no way to create knowledge that is not circum-
scribed by the oppressions of our times if we cannot imagine a better future, if we
cannot dream of a way of life that does away with the domination that is part of our
everyday realities, if we cannot envision other ways of being. (Pereira 2002, 1)
‘The power of the erotic’ is in itself a vision of this kind.

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 Situational Gender & Subversive Sex? 215

Ambiguities and Contradictions

‘Subversive Sex?’ is written with a question mark, because of all the ambiguities
and contradictions. Sylvia Tamale highlights the paradoxes, women’s bodies
being at one and the same time a target for their subordination, and a means for
assertive sexuality (Tamale 2005a). Analyzing the Ssenga institution in Uganda,
Tamale finds even more ambiguities. The Ssenga is, in Baganda contexts, the
paternal aunt, entrusted with instruction of young nieces, preparing them for
adult womanhood. The Ssenga’s primary responsibility, Tamale says, ‘was to
groom her nieces to become ‘good’subservient wives or co-wives. A husband who
was dissatisfied with his bride’s behaviour, particularly her ‘bedroom etiquette’,
would blame it on the laxity of her Ssenga, even returning the bride to the Ssenga
for ‘proper’ training’ (Tamale 2005b, 17). However, this tutelage also included
some empowering messages. The Ssenga would make it clear that a wife did not
have to tolerate an abusive spouse; if she felt abused, or if he failed to satisfy her
sexually, she had the right to return to her parent’s home. ‘Sexuality featured
prominently in Ssenga’s tutorials, which would focus on erotic skills, sexual para-
phernalia and aphrodisiacs in the form of herbal perfumes, sensual oils, sexual
beads (obutiti) and so on’ (Tamale 2005a, 6). According to Tamale, young
women are instructed to use sex for seduction and as a tool of manipulation.
Ssengas ‘encourage women to use sex to undermine patriarchal power from
behind a façade of subservience’ (Tamale 2005b, 24). Tamale makes interesting
note of the ways in which such sexually empowering instructions, rooted in
‘tradition’, meet young women’s demands for ‘gender equality’ rooted in notions
of women’s rights. She sees here possibilities regarding how ‘African women can
inherit and shape traditions of their own that go beyond the discourse of rights
imposed from above’ (ibid., 30),
In many other places in Africa beyond Uganda, young women are also well
educated in sexual arts. In my material from northern Mozambique, for
example, there are a lot of erotic tattoos and tantalizing glass beads around
women’s waists. In northern Mozambique, young women are educated as
seducers – sexual proficiency is a women’s capacity. But should this be seen as
subservience to husbands, or as a basis for sexual power and autonomy – or
both? Tamale highlights the ambiguities: ‘The institution of Ssenga facilitates
and reinforces patriarchal power, she says, while at the same time subverting
and parodying it’ (ibid., 12). Seen with Tamale’s eyes, the fact that Ssenga as an
institution has survived, and is even thriving in Kampala, in commercialized
and professionalized versions, invests the institution with new scope for chal-
lenging subordination and sexual control. ‘While the patriarchal agendas and
discourses embedded within Ssenga are unmistakable, women’s subversive and
counterhegemonic ‘silent struggles’ allow them to negotiate agency,’ she says
(ibid., 30).

Conclusion
In my view, the fields of investigation being opened by the type of research to
which I have referred in this chapter, have great promise. These studies chal-

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 216 II Night of the Women, Day of the Men

lenge established positions on several fronts, political as well as academic. In

their insistence on reinterpretations of ‘African culture’ from feminist points of
view, these studies challenge both development establishments and Western
feminist analysis, not to mention African male elites, who tend to interpret
‘African culture’ in decidedly patriarchal ways. African feminists point to inter-
pretations of ‘culture and tradition’ as a contested terrain. They suggest a poten-
tial ‘liberatory value of indigenous institutions’, thus representing ‘a very
different perspective to their idyllic or nostalgic portrayals … often seen in main-
stream patriarchal Africanist thinking’ (Tamale 2005b, 30). They further ques-
tion simplified notions of ‘gender equality’ exclusively rooted in ‘modernity’.
The idea of reinterpreting the past in order to find new strategies for the future
is crucial.
The African feminist writings discussed in this chapter provide inspiration
for reconceptualizing social structures and power relations in Africa gender
research, as well as to rethinking basic notions of feminist scholarship in
general. Thus, their contributions have implications beyond the borders of the
African continent. In line with Chandra Mohanty’s arguments for ‘feminism
without borders’ – learning from differences rather than glossing them over (cf.
the discussion of ‘Global Sisterhood’ above), I see north/south collaboration
and cross-border exchange between feminists, gender scholars and activists as
indispensable for the further development of feminist thinking and struggle.
Contributions from African feminist scholars are very important in this regard.

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