Eminent women drawn from various parts of the society have pushed for the appreciation of indigenous knowledge systems in supporting African women’s rights, stressing that there are very relevant aspects of indigenous African knowledge systems which are relevant to the lives of women.
This observation was part of those made at the last edition of the Toyin Falola Interview Series with the theme: ‘Celebrating African Women’s Research, Knowledge Production and Activism within Africa and in the Diaspora.’ Remarkably, the Toyin Falola Interviews which is the acclaimed platform created by erudite Professor of History, Toyin Falola, has become a very powerful virtual space for discussing issues which prioritise Africa, Africans and the African diaspora.
Among the very renowned members of the panel were Professor Ousseina Alidou (moderator); Professor Marame Gueye, a scholar-activist and Associate Professor of English and African Literatures at the East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina; Professor Fatima Sadiqi, a Professor of Linguistics and Gender Studies, University of Fez, Morocco; Professor Simone A. J. Alexander, a Professor of English, Africana Studies and Women and Gender Studies and affiliate member of the Russian and East European Studies Program at Seton Hall University; Dr. Zeinabou Hadari, a scholar and feminist from Niger who uses advocacy, research, knowledge, influence and philanthropy to promote social justice for women in her country; Professor Lidwien Kapteijns, a Kendall-Hodder Professor of History at Wellesley College, where she teaches African and Middle Eastern History; Professor Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed, a feminist activist-scholar and an assistant professor of global media in the College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia; and Professor Lilian Atanga, a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Florida and a non-Resident Research Fellow at the University of Free State in South Africa.
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Members of the audience who contributed to the conversation were led by Professor Falola, Professor Jacqueline-Bethel Mougou, Professor Tola Osunnuga, Professor Mary Owusu, T. Oloruntoba-Oju, Professor Joyce Endeley, and many others.
On the relevance of indigenous knowledge systems and digital spaces in championing the interests of African women, Dr Mohammed stated that “The bulk of my introspection is on African women in digital spaces. We try to make connections between the lived realities of African women on the continent and the experiences of African women in the diaspora. One of the things that we found is the globality of patriarchy, imperialism and how these have shaped the experiences of African women. We are looking at ways that we can theorize and think about knowledge production, building on the quotidian experiences of African women. Examples of questions that we were interested in asking were what does colorism look like in Ghana, in Nigeria, in Austin? What does that mean for anti-blackness and how it has manifested in global ways? We have also thought about how activism has gained against such issues as police brutality in Nigeria versus in America. We also found out what transnational solidarity look like as we think about dismantling these oppressive structures.
“I’d like us to think about what solidarity looks like across these platforms and how African feminists have used digital spaces to carry out solidarity work. And beyond, we are looking at how to connect these oppressions and struggles that we are familiar with, such as #BringBackOur Girls, EndSARS and MeeToo movements, and what can be done to learn from one another. We must understand the double marginalization that women experience. In many instances, prominent women are written out of both past and contemporary histories by virtue of their geographical location, ethnicity, class, identity and positions that they may have. I have run into issues with some people who do not think it is relevant to articulate the relevance of espousing an intersectional praxis as we do in feminist scholarship in Ghana. It is not surprising to find people who think that way. There were women who did not have western education but contributed and funded liberation struggles in Ghana and many colonies and sadly they were erased from history. We must learn from indigenous knowledge systems to support feminist organizing that we are doing and to understand the erasure of women in knowledge production, and also re-frame what feminism looks like from an indigenous perspective.”
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Professor Atanga told the audience that women must be deliberate in participatory inclusion in all areas of human endeavor. “Who I am defines what I do and how I engage. Coming from a rural background in Cameroon, I grew up watching my parents and my community relate with each other, how men relate with men, or how men relate with women, how women relate with women, and how women relate with men. As a child, I could not question all of these because I had internalized them in my cognition which is pretty much what everybody does. There is community and societal cognition; people have ways of being and doing which are based on assumptions and taken for granted. I studied theoretical linguistics for my masters, and then for my PhD I went into an academic shock by going into the library of a feminist scholar in Cameroon, and reading about gender. Books articulated things that I have known and felt but didn’t have the language for.
“I began thinking on how to relate gender to language, and my personal experiences. Then I moved to Lancaster University which is the centre for critical discourse studies and got again into critical analyses. This gave me the opening to question gender relations and understand that these gender relations are harnessed in language and where discourse is used in talking about men and women, girls and boys, and their relationships with each other. What are the intersections between societal cognitions of ways of being, doing and seeing by men, women, boys and girls and how we act and relate with each other? Discourse is a social practice and how does language become a practice? How does what I say become what I do? This took me into parliament and I began to ask why there are few women in parliament, when nothing constitutionally stops them from being in the parliament. Discourses around women have used terminologies like ‘empowerment’, ‘mainstreaming’, ‘substantive representation’, ‘numerical representation’, and ‘inclusion’. Women always fall on the object position and the subject position is always undefined and when it is defined, it is either men or institutions. These institutions are predominantly male,” she said.
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Earlier, Professor Gueye had saluted the industry of African women as formidable creators of communities and networks of relationships. According to her, “For a long time in academia, I felt a little bit confined because, to me as somebody who researches women’s knowledge, it was hard for me not to engage with women outside of academia. That is why I later decided to focus a lot on activism. But my interest first in terms of scholarship on women’s knowledge, I wanted to really emphasize African women, especially Senegalese or Wolof women which I know the most as serious knowledge producers. I think that sometimes we tend to look at what women do as relatively important; we don’t see them as knowledge producers. As someone who researched on her family, who has been around women producing knowledge through songs and poetry, it was illuminating to see how much knowledge comes from women who are not necessarily women who came from the academia. My first work was on the verbal art of Wolof women, and on my personal aunt who created the first women’s performing groups. They would travel around our region in Central Senegal, especially singing, producing songs and passing them on from generation to generation. They were really engaging the daily lives of women in their songs, especially during weddings and family ceremonies. What I wanted to ask was how does the daily lives of women, in terms of engaging each other, illuminate our work in academia and vice versa? How does this work or knowledge create connections beyond our lives and especially in the diaspora? As somebody who lives in the diaspora, I see how home sometimes affect our daily lives.
“Just to give you an example of women being knowledge producers, few days ago, I posted something on social media talking to a person and I said their praise-song on their father’s side. Few minutes after posting that, I received a DM from somebody that I had never met and she said ‘I am intrigued because I saw you write this praise-song, and my mother is praised in the same way.’ And in talking with her, I realized we were families; she lives in the US, and in our conversations we were able to trace the genealogy of each side of our families through that knowledge that comes from my paternal aunt who usually sings this praise-poetry to serenade us at family ceremonies.
“I also worked with a woman who was somebody who gave me lots of songs when I was collecting my dissertation and who now organizes Tarsu festival where a female self-aggrandizing genre is performed. Here, women boast of their attributes in a chant-like performance, and then dance afterwards. This woman whose mother was one of the most famous performers of Tarsu now organizes Tarsu at weekends in the summer whereby lots of people from Senegal come, and young people especially hip hop singers, come to learn how to perform Tarsu and also create it. I think this is very important in the sense that Tarsu is taken out of its immediate place of origin and put as some knowledge that can be passed down as education and through a practical way of doing it.
“I also want to talk about how in the diaspora as women, especially when it comes to gender, our cultural practices at home are enacted in the diaspora, and how they affect especially women in the diaspora. African women are the premier creators of communities and networks. These include financial networks, family networks, relationships, kinships and many others. In the diaspora, especially in America, we find ourselves pretty isolated when it comes to this community. In 2017 what I did, in my intention to really connect, was to look at the daily life of Senegalese women, especially in the diaspora. I created this network of women on social media; this is a very rich platform where we have conversations, not only our lives as immigrants but also to our connections with home and how that home affects our daily lives, and also how we can as immigrants contribute positively to creating change especially when it comes to gender empowerment and women liberation. To that effect, I am also part of several feminist networks in Senegal. I write a lot about notions of gender, and particularly when it comes to decoloniality with gender, it is always imbued with coloniality. The question that I ask is how is it that in our relationships with women, especially with African women, and we talk about returning to African ways, this always puts women at subordinate positions. How does this differ from the colonial way of looking at women? I think these are really important questions to look at and language is a site to look at these notions of decoloniality.”
Professor Sadiqi, on her part, mapped the various roles which women play as preservers of culture, customs, and tradition. For her, “I am a linguist and my mother tongue is Amazigh; and for me the Amazigh language and culture are links between North Africa and the rest of Africa, and I have experienced this first hand. This is because the first part of my work was about Amazigh language and culture. What I see is that Amazigh women are presented in most cases as preservers of culture. At the same time when you look at the language and you reflect on the fact that this is a language whose alphabets have not been used for texts and yet the language survived. It took me years to find out that it survived because it is linked to women’s design in carpet-weaving and rug-weaving. This intervention is a tribute to the weavers, anonymous women. To try to prove what I said, I had to go back to pre-history when North Africa was very much part of the Great Sahara. The fascinating thing is that the designs and art of the women were very much similar to some of the rock inscriptions that were recognized very long time ago. One of the areas of study which really helped to unearth this was archaeology.
“Archaeological work, in Morocco after independence and nowadays, has shown that the interpretation and findings reveal that the shape of the Amazigh alphabets, which I compared to the shapes of the designs that the women wove a long time ago, are similar. The message I want to pass on is a simple one. Women through art, their creativity, imagination, designs and symbolisms, express a lot that, even after the coming of Islam these things are part of our unconscious and art. Through their creativity, women actually helped codify the language which is why the Amazigh language has survived. This is because a language without an alphabet would not have survived. This is very much true in linguistics. This idea has fascinated and continues to fascinate me. When I look at some of the tattoos, jewelry and many other markers of identity that I found which resemble the rug designs, they relate the Amazigh population not only to Africa but also to everything we can recall, and when I say pre-history, I am saying thousands of years ago.
“There is a book written in French which appeared in 2016 which was very instrumental in pushing me in this direction and it is about the pre-history of the West. In it, you will see the findings of archeology and how old our heritage is. There are a lot of transnational similarities between women all over Africa: East, West, North and South. If people accept what I am saying, then we will open the door to many things that actually unite more than separate women from Africa. Very little is known about these things and I think it is our duty to continue to work in this direction. For me, this is knowledge production because in Amazigh studies, women are presented as preservers of culture but they have for a long time been between the preservation of this knowledge and now, the production of this knowledge. This means that women’s art is the basis of the codification of language which is very unique in the history of linguistics.”
Speaking on engendering partnerships among women, Professor Alexander argued that this had become crucial and must be encouraged if the needed progress in advancing the interests of African women is to be achieved. “What I am looking at are the feminist interventions of African and Caribbean diaspora women. I underscore the oppositional attributes of their knowledge production which I argue is not wedded to Western theoretical inscriptions but rather it distorts notions of fixity, dislodging and challenging categories of nation-state and nationhood. I am also looking at how these Caribbean writers are engaging with writers beyond their region. They break away from traditional ways of theorizing and they are advocating for women through feminist conscious approaches. Some of the strategies that they do employ include resisting prejudiced masculine narratives, creating feminist free markers to move beyond polarities and also recognizing a shared world of infinite appreciation of difference of women the world over. These feminist practices that they engage in celebrate differences even as they engage and advance coalition of gender politics which resist fixities and allow multiple histories and ways of being that can co-exist. As a result, they call for the need to re-theorize marginality and power.
“The 1980s for the Caribbean writer witnessed the end of an era of male-domination in Caribbean literature, and henceforth Caribbean feminist thinkers, right across the region, generated a surge of publications that showcased both their creative as well as critical talents. During this period, impressive literary texts like anthologies were published by these women that made very serious critical interventions which brought significant transitions dislodging the androcentric sentiments and also raising the profile of Caribbean feminist thinkers. These publications also marked the emergence of Caribbean feminist criticism as a mode of theoretical challenge that centred women’s lived experiences but also forced transnationalizing dialogues and partnerships among women,” she opined.
Dr Hadari praised Muslim women for reshaping history through innovation. According to her, “I had a career outside of academia. Whatever I did in terms of research, I did as an activist. I want to use my example as a Nigerien woman who decided to pursue her graduate studies for professional development purposes and who came to study in the US at a graduate level. I came on a Fulbright scholarship and I am very grateful for that, and I also obtained a doctorate. I came into research by reflecting on my own journey and from the fact that education is the best tool for upward social mobility and so I decided to choose a topic in relation to education. In Niger, we have the lowest rates of female education and actually on all grounds I decided to look at the reasons this was happening. When I was going on with my research, I found out that in terms of formal education, this was what was happening and also that there were people in society who were more inclined to go for Islamic or Quranic education based on different factors and justifications.
“I found out that there were discrepancies in that field, that it was not as one piece as seen. I decided to dig into it and came to find out that actually there are women who are using their leadership to promote themselves and other women’s rights. I found out that this was well located in one religious community. I came up with the total women education model. I discovered that this religious community was using their own agency and they did not quit the fundamentals of Islam but they were able to promote themselves and women’s rights; they were able to capture a lot of opportunities to empower themselves. They established a Quranic-based education creatively but they also domesticated the internet and information technologies. They also operated other formal and non-formal, local and global springs that were available not only to enrich their curricular but to integrate all those assets into various strategies for women. The findings of this research convinced me about the relevance of the contributions of Muslim women to the functioning of their societies by the way they reinvent and shape historical processes in innovative ways. Of course, related to this production of knowledge is that these women are also producers of knowledge and their pedagogies.”
In order to boost research efforts on promoting women’s rights, Professor Kapteijns argued that there must be increased funding and better academic valuation. “We have been asked to talk about our own work with regards to the knowledge production of African women. In my case that is very much the knowledge production of African women of the past in their own works, languages and also in their role in the creation, preservation and dissemination of this past knowledge production. I am doing this from the positionality of an outsider. Before speaking about the research publications that I worked on about Sudan, I would like to focus for a minute on a generation of women scholars from the Global North, mostly white but including also prominent African American historians who were the first large cohort of professional historians of Africa to write African history about African women. These women founded the women’s caucus within the African Studies Association of the US to bring African women scholars’ annual conferences which have become completely established. This was in the early 1980s. Initially more aware of patriarchy and the power differential between the Global North and South than of the institutionalized racism in the US of which they were beneficiaries, they never less made contribution to African women’s history. And while they did not necessarily produce source publication, many did include women’s worth and texts in their works.
“One of my major books was Women’s voices in a Man’s World. It presented and analyzed Somali texts of three kinds: first were late 19th and 20th century texts that had been collected and published by colonial linguists and ethnographers from which I asked what they could tell us about women’s agency and this turned out actually to be a lot because women talked back even indirectly in these texts. They also gave ample evidence about women’s resistance against patriarchal rules. These were colonially-mediated texts. I think old texts are mediated and complex but the colonially collected ones were particularly mediated. The second kind of texts in that book was about women’s work songs and religious songs. The third kind of texts was about Somali popular songs of the 1950s to 1970s that dealt very explicitly with gender issues and were sung by women who informally co-created by them. These songs often took the form of debates between men and women with women usually speaking for women’s rights. Women were also expected, as is also common with nationalistic contests, to bear the burden of authenticity and morality especially with their presence in public space and also their sexuality. Now these songs are all over YouTube and it is amazing how Somalis, even in the diaspora, have preserved these songs.
“African historical texts in African languages, however connected to wider networks and geographies in contents, are very local in form: in this case, the language of only one town. And therefore, they do not get a wide reading about which publishers really care. Moreover, they are not as valued as monographs in university tenures and promotion procedures. I have one more action item to think about and this is how we might find ways to increase funding and academic valuation of source publications,” she proposed.
The interaction attracted an audience which ran into millions and was streamed on various media platforms across many countries in Africa and beyond.
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