Feminist Knowledge | Review Essay: African Feminist Studies: 1980-2002

Feminist Theory and Women's Movements in Africa

Unlike feminist scholarship in the West, feminist theory and scholarship in Africa have formed neither a neatly delineated field, nor one firmly rooted in theoretically-inflected politics. With the consolidation of Western feminisms between 1960 and the early 1980s and the growth of the so-called second wave, clear political and intellectual traditions were formed around radical, liberal and Marxist/socialist feminisms. Subsequent feminisms drew on or deviated from these positions to engage increasingly with theories and politics emerging in the nineties. African theories and women's movements have taken very different paths.

In certain ways, African theories and women's movements have been closely linked to politics, although this politics has not always been specifically feminist. During the late fifties and sixties, African women were drawn increasingly into national liberation struggles, with gender politics having obliquely filtered into broader mobilisation against colonialism and class oppression. While the women's movements formed at this time were not clearly feminist, they indicate a tradition - dating from the fifties - of women organising around the network of gender, race and class relations. This distinguishes trends in Africa from patterns in the west, where it was really only from the eighties that feminist theory and politics began to acknowledge how pivotally class, race, ethnicity and other social relations influenced gendered struggles.

African theories, like women's movements, have explicitly and systematically focused on the range of discourses and power relations that shape "gender". Yet superficially similar arguments about the interconnectedness of race, imperialism and gender are underpinned by very different political and theoretical foundations. Tracing the development of this argument among African feminists is therefore important, particularly because "African feminism" is often pigeonholed as a homogenous body of culturally marginal (or oppositional) practice and knowledge.

Feminists' differing views about the nexus of imperialism and gender also uncover the different intellectual and political legacies of feminisms on the continent. Various commentators have observed that the inauguration of feminist scholarship and women's studies in Africa was not linked to the consolidation of a women's movement in a way similar to the early connections between academia, the women's movement and feminist activism in the west. It is important to note, however, that the connections between Western feminist activism and academia are largely a legacy of the past. More recently, academic feminism and feminist activism have growth further and further apart, with much of the path-breaking scholarship in theory or different disciplines having little or no connection to feminist activism and gender advocacy. In contrast, the connections between feminist activism and academia in Africa have often been progressively strengthened, with many academics working to insert their voices into policy-related and developmental work and to dislodge the state's monopoly over development strategies and gender advocacy. Currently, the cult of reverence that has developed around celebrated feminists - like Gayatri Spivak, Rosi Braidotti or Judith Butler, as well as scholars who have settled in the United States such as Ifi Amadiume [13] - is unusual to most parts of Africa. Here, leading feminists like Pat McFadden, Fatou Sow, Ruth Meena, Sylvia Tamale, Bolanle Awe, Amina Mama, Zenebeworke Tadesse and Sylvia Tamale among many others, often work collaboratively, regularly participate in advocacy and applied work or women's movements, rarely confine their energies to conventional university-bound scholarship, and are not defined as icons in ways that their counterparts are in the United States, Britain and Western Europe

Despite these contrasting histories, the origins of Western feminisms in a strong women's movement are different from its origins in Africa. Factors like the influence of foreign technologies of gender and a donor-driven development industry, limited funding and weak institutional and political links among scholars and activists on the continent have all affected organic connections between research and writing on one hand, and activism on the other. Tracing the origins of African feminisms therefore proves more complicated than is the case with Western feminisms. African theories have grown out of the distinctive encounters of particular writers or women's movements with local and global processes. In what follows, I explore these encounters by identifying four key trajectories in theoretical developments on the continent. I show that the four directions traced below have been shaped by the distinct encounters of pioneering gender scholars with women's movements and with different local and global processes.

Among the first feminists to realign understandings of gender and feminism from an African perspective were Nawal el Saadawi, Ama Ata Aidoo, Molara Ogundipe and Chikwenye Ogunyemi. Often motivated by their reading of African women authors who did not conform to Western thematic expectations and forms, these thinkers and writers were concerned primarily with existential questions, focusing often on the extent to which African women's writing and political expression registered a unique engagement with subjectivity and gendered social and psychological experiences. Their overarching concern was the patriarchal character of imperialism and the way that African women's gendered identities inevitably revolved around racial, colonial or imperial domination. Ogunyemi, the Nigerian literary critic, therefore argued that black women writers "are distinct from white feminists because of their race, because they have experienced the past and present subjugation of the black population along with present day subtle (or not so subtle) control exercised over them by the alien Western culture" (1984:64). This concern led writers to contest ostensibly universal explanations of gendered subjectivity and experience developed by pioneering feminist literary critics like Elaine Showalter, Mary Eagleton, Susan Gubar and Annette Kolodny.

African critics and writers made interventions into mainstream feminist thought at the same time that third-world feminists like Chandra Mohanty or Trinh T Minh-ha (1989) and African-American critics like Deborah McDowell (1986) and Barbara Smith (1986) were challenging certain North American feminists' occlusion of racism and classism in certain feminisms. Common to both the North American and African interventions during the late seventies and early eighties was a powerfully reactive and polemical tendency. This is epitomised in Barbara Smith's claim that "When white women look at Black women's works they are of course ill-equipped to deal with the subtleties of racial politics… Until a Black feminist criticism exists we will not even know what these writers mean" (1986:170). In similar ways to Smith, many African theorists concentrated on defining African feminist theory in terms of what Western feminist theory was not. This orientation fostered emphatic strategies of self-naming to signal an angry defiance of imperial control, silencing and misrepresentation.

Pre-eminently reactive currents among many African feminists, consolidating a global scrutiny of Western feminism among culturally marginal and third-world feminists in the eighties, continue to inflect the tenor and goals of a major strand within African feminist thought. Deborah McDowell, herself endorsing alternative black feminisms in the eighties, criticised the tradition of angry condemnation among African-American feminists in the following way: "Black feminist scholarship has been decidedly more practical than theoretical, and the theories developed thus far have often… been marred by slogans, rhetoric and idealism" (1986:188). McDowell pinpoints a knee-jerk preoccupation with rebuttal and defiant self-affirmation, a preoccupation which has taken prior place over rigorous analysis, exploration and the definition of long-term alternative political visions.

"Womanism", espoused by a number of African and African-American feminists, originates in this tradition of angry denunciation. Believing that much feminist terminology does not adequately address the locations or experiences of women in Africa, scholars like Chikwenye Ogunyemi, Hudson-Weems and Jane Splawn argue that the usage of the term "feminism" recuperates an imperialist legacy. They therefore turn to self-naming in order to redefine black (African and "Africana") women's subjectivity. The prominence of this tradition of separatist and, to a large degree, reactive scholarship, is evident in the journal, Womanist Theory and Research: A Journal of Womanist and Feminist-of-Color Scholarship and Art [14] , as well as in the increasing growth of womanist research and scholarship today. Importantly, womanism has been embraced more readily by radical African-American women than by women within Africa. This is probably the main indication of the weight accorded to self-naming and polemical reaction in situations where minority groups of radical women challenge acute experiences of silencing, cultural domination and misrepresentation.

At the same time that many theorists, turning mainly to African women's existential concerns, focused on refuting mainstream feminisms, a number of African scholars defined priorities for feminist politics and research by carefully interpreting African women's quotidian and socio-political experiences. From the early eighties, Bolanle Awe, Christine Obbo, Fatima Mernissi, Pat McFadden, Zenebeworke Tadesse, among others, working as activists, writers and scholars, broke silences surrounding women's subordination in the years of nation-building that followed struggles against colonialism. The chequered histories of Africa's women scholars and activists in the late seventies and early eighties have yet to be documented as crucial chapters in the history of African women's movements. Struggling for autonomy in relation to male-centred nationalism and post-independence nation-building, they wrote and worked under extremely hostile conditions. The absence of institutional and political bases for their activism and writing meant that they often worked in isolation. Their migration from institution to institution, or from country to country testifies to battles to find spaces for political expression implicitly or explicitly censored in most African countries. These experiences of marginalisation, persecution and, in many cases, refugeeism are telling indictments of the heavily masculinist climate of the post-colonial state. Catherine Nelson captures the ethos in which these feminists worked when she cites Geraldine Heng: "The state…has divided modernization into two distinct categories, technological and social. Anything in the first category is positive; anything in the second category is negative. The African state thereby connected feminism to social Westernization and hence declared feminism undesirable and dangerous" (2001:71).

Dealing with subjects that spanned sexuality, women's work and political organisation, these feminists introduced women's rights discourses into public debates surrounding post-independent nation-building. Their theoretically suggestive and cross-disciplinary explorations of African women's economic, social, personal and political struggles led them to demonstrate that African women's subjectivities and struggles always encoded the nexus of imperialism, race and class. Focusing not so much on how women in Africa differed from women in the West, as on the distinctive economic, political and cultural dilemmas confronting African women, their work moves far beyond polemical critique of Western feminism to signal the growth of historically-grounded analyses of African gender politics.

These writers have directly articulated agendas for women's movements in Africa, and, in the years after decolonisation in the 70s and early 80s, shaped the radical analysis of women and gender that succeeded the emphasis on women's participation in nationalism. It should be stressed that a significant body of documentation and research on women's nationalist participation celebrates their political involvement without reflecting the gendered parameters of this involvement. In southern Africa, a scholar like Pat McFadden, editor of the feminist journal SAFERE (Southern African Feminist Review), or Christine Obbo, a Ugandan feminist who dealt with women's work, or Molara Ogundipe, working extensively on the connections between women's voices, women's agency and African feminist politics gave important direction to the focused gender analysis that surfaced in the post-colonial period. Many of today's research networks and women's organisations partly take their impetus from the insights which this first wave of post-independence feminists defined - often in the face of enormous hostility from the patriarchal institutional environments in which they were situated. [15]

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ttf font karas handful galleries nawa shibari volusia pennysaver tufcot components and bearings gumuchian bracelets gerald genta fantasy watches purchase wood pellets rastis p rulz chronoswiss orea ask jeebs justine visone michelle monseau simcha shtull house of the dead florist las vegas why did jesus die walther p1 9mm langlade kitchen sink anonymous prxy secure pharmacokinetics of phentolamine refried beans recipe nude moppets soggiorno firenze centro storico heartburn remedies http downspout diverter flo's v8 cafe oceanography book titlesca, sans-serif" size="2">From the eighties, women's organisations and research networks like AAWORD and, in Nigeria, WORDOC, as well as women's networks operating within CODESRIA or SAPES, worked to strengthen the post-independence women's movement in Africa. Currently, these networks foster and sustain communities of feminist researchers in important ways. They have also produced influential collaborative works like the AAWORD Book Series; Isugo-Abanihe and Graba's Women and Economic Reforms in Nigeria (1997), Layiwola's African Notes: Women and Access to Credit (1991) and Odejide's Women and the Media in Nigeria (1996), all published by WORDOC; Women and Gender in Southern Africa (1991), Southern Africa in Transition: A Gendered Perspective (1998) and Reflections on Gender Issues in Africa (1999), published by SAPES; and Engendering the African Social Sciences (1997), published by CODESRIA. Research produced in these contexts has helped build a discernible tradition of locally-grounded feminist scholarship on the continent. It has also generated a supportive intellectual climate for young feminists researchers. The scholars and activists who shaped this climate often dealt with particular topics and concrete processes, rather than with epistemology and theory. It is nonetheless clear that their work has contributed enormously to theory-building in Africa.

Social science work with an explicitly theoretical orientation has been produced by scholars including Ifi Amadiume (1987, 1997, 2000) and Oyeronke Oyewumi (1997, 2000). Amadiume's theoretical contribution is rooted in her anthropological studies dealing mainly with women during the pre-colonial period. Her prolific oeuvre contributes to a paradigm that celebrates powerful and self-generated struggles by African women. Her key arguments about the powers of pre-colonial African women are developed by Oyeronke Oyewumi, whose critique of Western feminism is linked to analysis of the social construction of identity in pre-colonial Nigeria, analysis which sets out to cast doubt on the universality of "gender" as a social construct. This theoretical work intersects with a number of other studies, including the Beyond Inequalities: Women in Southern Africa series (2000), as well as recent work by Heike Becker (2000). All these positions highlight the extent to which feminist concepts are historically rooted.

Certain claims that "gender" is a foreign imposition that distorts pre-colonial realities tend to suppress the hierarchies in which African men and women were situated, even though these hierarchies did not necessarily reflect the concepts and models that most feminists assume. Overall, however, the vast body of work that revisits pre-colonial societies to develop epistemological critiques of feminist concepts has been a pivotal strand - with the potential for directing further exploration - in African-centred theory.

Much recent theoretical work by African-based scholars has dovetailed with post-structuralist theoretical explorations and suggests an important paradigm shift from the nineties. For example, Pat McFadden, in a recent article on culture and resistance, draws on Said and Gramsci to explore discourse as a site of post-nationalist African feminist struggle (2001). Amina Mama has focused on subjectivity as an entry point into cross-disciplinary explorations of women's experiences and struggles in Africa. This approach informs much of her work on politics and the state [16] , but it is most clearly outlined in her Beyond the Masks (1995), a study of black diasporic women's subjectivity that yields important comparative insights into the articulation of race, imperialism and gender in Africa. Marjorie Mbilinyi's work is similarly inflected by a critical engagement with post-structuralism. Defining her origins as "European/American" and redefining herself as a "critical Third-World feminist", she writes that "Identities or positions are the product of struggle and they represent an achieved, not an ascribed trait… 'Third World Feminist' connotes a critical analysis of the imperial relations, not a geographical location or physical trait" (1992:35). As her comments suggest, much recent work registers an emphasis on self-reflexivity and positioning for feminists. Increasingly, scholars are acknowledging that all representation and knowledge production are mediated, and that feminist research and practice, if it is not to betray its progressive thrust, is always relational and partial.

Beyond Africa, the growing emphasis, especially during the nineties, on addressing fluid subject positions and social processes was directly influenced by post-structuralism and deconstruction. While Africanist feminists have generally made contributions to particular disciplines and have not pioneered primarily theoretical work, many have made analytical and scholarly interventions that now inform suggestive theoretical paradigms for interpreting African women's resistance and subjectivities. Notable theoretical interventions have been made by literary critics such as Carol Boyce Davies (1989, 1994, 1995), by historians like Marcia Wright (1993) and Nancy Hunt (1989, 1990, 1997), by anthropologists like Dorothy Hodgson (2001) and by economists like April Gordon (1996a; 1996b). Davies has developed especially insightful methodologies and reading strategies for exploring women writers' gendered themes, and in so doing has openined up investigation of subjectivities and multiple social locations. Historians like Wright and Hunt have launched innovative explorations of resistance, with their methodological focus on positioning their research highlighting ways in scholarship inevitably encodes the agendas of researchers. April Gordon critically appraises conservative development paradigms and develops radical approaches to production, progress and development in relation to African gender dynamics, while Hodgson has focused on Tanzania to develop general insights into the cultural dynamics underlying development, power and gender.

This work marks a general progressive shift in the way that feminist scholars located in the west have been approaching gender relations and women's experiences in the third world. In particular, it transcends representations of African women as homogenous ciphers, a tradition that ultimately reinforces complacent self-representations of enlightened western feminism. Yet it often differs in orientation from the work produced by feminist scholars who live or have worked extensively in Africa. Attention to the nexus of race, imperialism and gender has become de rigueur for most feminists, and many have been carefully self-reflexive in their work. But the insight of African-based scholars whose research and scholarship has fused with political activism and lived experiences of the concerns about which they write, rings with a special urgency and shapes historically-grounded and activist-oriented scholarship in distinctive ways.

The four theoretical trajectories traced above, each rooted in distinct histories and in critics' intellectual and political locations, all focus on the nexus of race, class and imperialism. One, drawing together African and African-American women, emerges out of resistance to acutely-experienced forms of dominant feminism and an existential impulse towards self-naming; a second is shaped by activism, empirical observation and close analysis of African women's experiences, a third often takes recourse to post-structuralism while retaining a focus on African intellectual agendas and politics, and a fourth, located in the west, is shaped primarily by an intellectual climate of post-structuralist and especially post-colonial inquiry.

Much of the work produced within these trajectories highlights a central distinguishing feature of African theories, namely that proponents generally integrate theorising with sociological, historical, literary and other studies. In fact, theory developed by African feminist scholars often proves difficult to delineate. Two main reasons explain this. One is that publishing, institutional and research resources in the West encourage specialisation and relatively well-funded research. Western feminist scholarship is therefore grounded in a supportive material base, with this facilitating a body of specialised work often based on years of dedicated academic research within clearly delineated fields.

Many feminist scholars based in Africa have had far fewer of these material and structural advantages. Consequently, they have not had the opportunities to consolidate theoretical research in the specialised ways that many other feminist scholars have. It is evident, then, that the growth of African feminist theory and specialist research has often been constrained by limited resources and hostile institutional and political contexts. This situation has considerably fostered the hegemony of metropolitan theories. The highly visible, widely disseminated scholarship of feminists based in the West, who focus on African contexts has become, irrespective of its quality, extremely accessible and authoritative.

A second reason for the limited attention to specialist theory-building for feminists in Africa has strengthened rather than constrained scholarship. Many African feminist scholars are rooted in activist or practice-oriented working environments and life experiences. This means that standpoint and an engagement with real-life or concrete situations provide all-important foundations for grounding their theories. Molara Ogundipe-Leslie's Re-creating Ourselves: African Women and Critical Transformations (1994) vividly illustrates the fusion of genres, disciplines and subject-matter - shaped by actively engaging different cultural and social processes - that can be marshalled in theoretical considerations. Incorporating essays on structural adjustment, appraisals of the women's movement in Nigeria, a prose poem and literary criticism, this eclectic project addresses key theoretical considerations, although these remain anchored in applications or analysis.

Generally, the insularity associated with specialisation that often characterises Western scholarship is rarely evident in Africa, since many theorists have worked extensively in women's movements or in policy-related and advocacy fields. This has strengthened channels of influence between activism and academia: scholars frequently develop path-breaking theory on the basis of their activist or applied work, while progressive lobbying in such fields as gender-based violence, grow out of strong research and writing. Overall, there has been no shortage of African women academics' involvement in advocacy-related fields. For example, Emang Basadi, a Botswanan NGO, has drawn significantly on the participation of academics in working to transform deep-seated and specially violent gender-based injustice, while scholars like Ruth Meena and Marjorie Mbilinyi in Tanzania have worked closely with donors, the Tanzanian government and NGOs to encourage progressive changes in this country's educational policy.

Clearly, all feminists connect personal experiences to their politics and intellectual work. But the degree of connectedness to real life - influenced by particular historical experiences of cultural marginalisation and social oppression - shapes feminist theories in distinctive ways. Interestingly, Patricia Hill Collins makes this point in her discussion of African-American women's intellectual traditions:

Denied positions as scholars and writers which allow us to emphasize purely theoretical concerns, the work of most Black women intellectuals is influenced by the merger of action and theory. The activities of nineteenth-century Black women intellectuals… exemplify this tradition... Contemporary Black women intellectuals continue to draw on this tradition of using everyday actions and experiences in our theoretical work. (1991:29)

While African feminist theorising on the continent has often been shaped by a particular engagement with practice and experience, it has also drawn significantly on scholarship and theorising in the West. Likewise, Western feminist scholarship has evolved in distinctive ways because of its engagement with women's political and intellectual struggles in the third world. Certain patterns of influence and cross-fertilisation have been reciprocal, progressive and mutually beneficial. Other patterns, stemming from the global dominance of Western intellectual priorities and from the diluting of feminist agendas by conservative political agendas, have marginalised contextually-grounded theory. It is noteworthy that the theoretical inflection of much work ranging from gender training and policy-making to teaching and academic research has been strongly influenced by conservative and technicist theories originating in the West, and especially the United States. An influential orientation here has been liberal feminism and the discourses of developmentalism and modernisation to which it is linked. Liberal feminism and the developmental paradigm interpret Africa from the perspective of its economic "inefficiency". The prescription associated with this is that women of Africa should be concertedly "captured" by the global market and the economic initiatives of the state.

Consolidated during the UN decade for women, liberal feminism provides foundations for definitive technologies of gender. Its economic, institutional and political backing has allowed it to form the basis of a veritable industry of tertiary education programmes, publications and development projects. These often end up dominating the research and training of gender scholars both in Africa and abroad. The increasing weight placed on gender research in Africa from the time of the United Nations Decade for Women in 1970 has not always augured well for gender activism or critical scholarship on the continent. Models underpinned by Women in Development (WID), Women and Development (WAD) and Gender and Development (GAD) permeate research, teaching and policy-making and severely hinder the growth of a post-colonial feminism sensitive to class, regional, ethnic and sexual divisions.

Liberal frameworks and their technicist concepts and analytical tools are more prominent in applied work than in scholarly and specialist research. Yet functionalist technologies of gender offer the superficial appeal of practical relevance to Africa. Because they have been so widely disseminated, they can erode emergent nuanced, theoretically rigorous and critical models. The apparent practical relevance and the relative accessibility of functionalist models in published guides, handbooks and other documentation can therefore sideline radical and contextually-rooted theoretical models for applied work on gender. Mama incisively appraises this situation when she points to the concentration of Development Studies within African studies:

Development studies have been dominated by economics, and by technocratic approaches to development, dedicated to the service of national and international policy-makers and bureaucracies of the development industry. Financial exigencies have seen to it that there is a concentration on consultancy work in most Development Studies centres. These factors have made Development Studies less amenable to detailed and necessarily time-consuming scholarly research and theoretical production; indeed to intellectual work that is not immediately relevant to practical concerns and to solving problems identified by development projects. (1997:76)

A number of African feminist scholars have developed acute critical appraisals of these models and also identify radical alternatives both for the future and in the past. A seminal work here is Gender in Southern Africa: Conceptual and Theoretical Issues, edited by Ruth Meena (1992). Many contributions to this collection, most notably by Meena, Gaidzanwa and Mbilinyi, provide acute appraisals of WID and its ideological underpinnings in liberal feminism. Mbilinyi writes: "WID projects and programmes actually construct North/South inequalities and inequities at every level, including amongst women researchers, activists and scholars, and between them as a group and the majority of poor, labouring women" (1992:48). Concurring with these views, Mama traces the "long involvement of women in the radical politics of the region" and argues that "WID…is able to avoid directly challenging patriarchy and capitalism and demanding the confrontation of women's oppression, instead targeting women as a group to be 'integrated into development'… governments of whatever political colour are called upon to mobilise women for their vaguely defined notion of national interest" (1996:5).

A further exploration of the political and epistemological diversity within African feminist theory concerns the divergent ways in which feminists have theorised gendered identity. For some, African women's difference from Western women is in itself a basis for celebratory affirmation. Thus, constructed and prescribed identities, simply because they are unique to Africa, are seen to constitute feminism. This argument is exemplified in Catherine Acholonu's Motherism: The Afrocentric Alternative to Feminism, in which she coins the term "motherism" as a "multidimensional Afrocentric theory" (1995: 110), prescribes roles of service and nurturing for the African woman as "motherist" and ends up reinforcing standard gender stereotypes. Writing more recently, Mikell claims that "African feminism is distinctly heterosexual and pro-natal" and grants a pivotal place to women's supportive roles. For certain theorists, then, African women's ascribed roles and identities are seen to constitute the basis for an alternative feminism, and they often applaud oppressive stereotypes, like persistently circulating images of the African woman as mother or superwoman. While they appear to provide African alternatives to Western feminism, they risk ignoring ways in which oppressive or conservative African femininities are buttressed by these images.

The extent to which culturally resonant and oppressive icons and practices continue to inform thought that claims to speak in the name of African women's liberation highlights a key gap in scholarship on gendered subjectivity. Here the complex social and symbolic meanings of motherhood for African women are an especially important site for critical and analytical intervention. Since the publication of Nancy Chodorow's radical feminist study of mothering (1978), motherhood has been at the centre of a range of feminist debates. In the years following Chodorow's study, it has been demonstrated that the meanings of mothering vary from context to context. To Elizabeth Spelman (1988), speaking as a feminist located in the West but dwelling on the cultural biases of Western knowledge, and Patricia Hill Collins (1991), dealing with trends in an African-American context, black women's mothering is always connected to the responsibilities of supporting oppressed communities; it is never reducible to what Chodorow considered to be the "biological fact" of mothering. In Africa, nationalist and ethnic projects, both during the colonial and post-colonial periods, have galvanised the iconography and practice of mothering to prescribe supportive and purely symbolic roles for African women.

This poses considerable challenges for African feminists, seeking to celebrate women's powers and contributions to communal and anti-imperialist struggles, while at the same time critically assessing the pressures placed on women to perform supportive roles. That much recent work simply celebrates strong mother and superwoman images is an index of the enormous need for careful further reflection on the construction and historical evolution of women's subject positions in the context of powerful masculinist nation-building and ethnic projects in Africa.

Further exploration of gender identity would necessarily need to develop analysis of masculinities in Africa. Such work would demonstrate ways in which masculinity is built into practices ranging from militarism to ethnic violence. It is a startling indication of the limitations of progressive African scholarship produced by researchers like Mahmood Mamdani, Achille Mbembe and Kwame Appiah, that their extremely perceptive discussions of social and cultural processes in Africa rarely register the centrality of masculinity, and the extent to which gender is an all-important component of the complex post-colonial processes and histories with which they are concerned. Work done by feminist scholars on literature, HIV/AIDS, nationalism and culture has gone a long way towards addressing questions surrounding masculinity and sexuality, although these subjects continue to present a hugely resonant gap in scholarship.

Since the eighties, African feminist scholars have produced a range of reflective studies of identity, subjectivity and the broad question of "what it means to be African". Generally, however, this work has not been received from the perspective of its general philosophical contribution to African scholarship. This is interestingly revealed in African Philosophy: An Anthology edited by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (1998). The anthology draws together a tremendous range of African-centred reflections, and includes contributions such as Chinua Achebe's discussion of Igbo philosophy, Julius Nyerere's reflections on leadership, Aime Cesaire's exploration of colonialism, Frantz Fanon's discussion of neo-colonialism as well as numerous writings by African-Americans, Afro-Caribbeans and African-descended European and Black Atlantic authors. Revealingly, however, the five contributions in a section titled "Philosophy and Gender" are by Marie Eboh, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Elizabeth Spelman and Sandra Harding, with the exclusion of the numerous African women scholars whose work has systematically explored philosophical issues speaking volumes about the dismissal of African women's voices in African traditions of reflective thought. The claim made in the preface that the anthology contests assumptions that "one people, epoch, or tradition could arrogantly claim to have either singularly invented philosophy, or to have a monopoly over the specific yet diverse processes of search for knowledge typical to the discipline" (1998: ix-x) is therefore hugely ironic. In the light of the concerted exclusion of African women's voices so strongly evident in the collection African Philosophy, the work reviewed in this study can encourage us to rethink many canonised areas of knowledge production. At the same time that it makes visible relationships and experiences that are ignored in male-centred knowledge, much of it intervenes into, counters and contributes to the intellectual reflection that is distinctive to philosophy.

Footnotes