Houria Bouteldja is the spokesperson for the PIR. This is her speech at the 4th International Congress of Islamic Feminism that took place in Madrid, in October 2010.

I would, first of all, like to thank the Junta Islamica Catalana for having organized this colloquium, which is a real breath of fresh air in a Europe that is shriveling up in upon itself, wrought up in xenophobic debates and increasingly rejecting difference/alterity.

I hope that such an initiative will be able to take place in France. Before getting into the subject at hand, I would like to introduce myself, as I believe that speech should always be located.

I live in France, I am the daughter of Algerian immigrants. My father was a working class man and my mother was a housewife. I am not speaking as a sociologist, a researcher or a theologian. In other words, I am no expert. I am an activist and I am speaking as a result of my experience as a political activist and, I might add, my own personal sensibility. I am insisting on these details because I would like to be as honest as possible in my reasoning. Truth be told, until today, I hadn’t really thought about the question of Islamic feminism. So why am I taking part in this colloquium? When I was invited, I made it quite clear that I lacked the authority to speak about Islamic feminism and that I would rather deal with the idea of decolonial feminism and the ways in which, I believe, it should be related to the more general question of Islamic feminism. That is why I thought I would lay out a few questions that could prove useful for our collective questioning.

Is feminism universal?

What is the relationship between white/Western feminisms and Third World feminisms among which we find Islamic feminisms?

Is feminism compatible with Islam?

If it is, then how can it be legitimized and what would its priorities be?

First Question: Is feminism universal?

For me, it is the question of all questions when adopting a decolonial approach and when attempting to decolonize feminism. This question is essential, not because of the answer but rather because it makes us, we who live in the West, take the necessary precautions when we are confronted with ‘Other’ societies. Let’s take, for example, so-called, Western societies that witnessed the emergence of feminist movements and have been influenced by them. The women who fought against patriarchy in favor of an equal dignity between men and women gained rights and improved women’s circumstances, which I, myself, benefit from. Let’s compare their situation, that is to say our situation, with that of so-called “primitive” societies in Amazonia for instance. There are still societies here and there that have been spared by Western influence. I should add here that I don’t consider any society to be primitive. I think there are differing spaces/times on our planet, different temporalities, that no civilization is in advance or behind on any other, that I don’t locate myself on a scale of progress and that I don’t consider progress an end in itself nor a political goal.  In other words, I don’t necessarily consider progress to be progressive but sometimes, even often, it is regressive. And, I think that the decolonial question can also be applied to our perception of time. Getting back to the subject at hand, if we take as our criteria the simple notion of well-being, who in this room can state that the women from those societies (who know nothing of the concept of feminism as we conceive of it) are less well-off than European women who not only took part in the struggles but also made available, to their societies, these invaluable social gains?  I, myself, find it quite impossible to answer this question and would consider quite fortunate whoever could. But yet again, the answer is of no importance. The question itself is, for it humbles us, and curbs our imperialist tendencies as well as our interfering reflexes. It prevents us from considering our own norms as universal and trying to make other’s realities fit into our own. In short, it makes us locate ourselves with regards to our own particularities.

Having laid out that question clearly, I now feel more at ease to tackle the second question dealing with the relationship between Western feminisms and Third World feminisms. Obviously it’s very complicated but one of its dimensions is the domination of the global south by the global north. A decolonial approach should question this relationship and attempt to subvert it. An example:

In 2007, women from the Movement of the Indigenous of the Republic took part in the annual 8th of March demonstration in support of women’s struggles. At that time, the American campaign against Iran had begun. We decided to march behind a banner that’s message was “No feminism without anti-imperialism”. We were all wearing Palestinian kaffiyehs and handing out flyers in support of three resistant Iraqi women taken prisoner by the Americans. When we arrived, the organizers of the official procession started chanting slogans in support of Iranian women. We found these slogans extremely shocking given the ideological offensive against Iran at that time. Why the Iranians, the Algerians and not the Palestinians and the Iraqis? Why such selective choices? To thwart these slogans, we decided to express our solidarity not with Third World women but rather with Western women. And so we chanted:

Solidarity with Swedish women!

Solidarity with Italian women!

Solidarity with German women!

Solidarity with English women!

Solidarity with French women!

Solidarity with American women!

Which meant: why should you, white women, have the privilege of solidarity? You are also battered, raped, you are also subject to men’s violence, you are also underpaid, despised, your bodies are also instrumentalized…

I can tell you that they looked at us as if we were from outer space. What we were saying seemed surreal, inconceivable. It was like the 4th dimension.  It wasn’t so much the fact that we reminded them of their situation as Western women that shocked them. It was more the fact that African and Arabo-Muslim women had dared symbolically subvert a relationship of domination and had established themselves as patrons. In other words, with this skillful rhetorical turn, we showed them that they de facto had a superior status to our own. We found their looks of disbelief quite entertaining.

Another example: After a solidarity trip to Palestine, a friend was telling me how the French women had asked the Palestinian women if they used birth control. According to my friend, the Palestinian women couldn’t understand such a question given how important the demographic issue is in Palestine. They were coming from a completely different perspective. For many Palestinian women, having children is an act of resistance against the ethnic cleansing policies of the Israeli state.

There you have two examples that illustrate our situation as racialized women, that help understand what is at stake and envisage a way to fight colonialist and Eurocentric feminism.

Following on from that question, is Islam compatible with feminism? This question is purely provocative on my behalf. I can’t stand it. I am asking this question as a French journalist who believes they are asking a really pertinent question. As for me, I refuse to answer out of principle. On the one hand, because it comes from a position of arrogance. The representative of civilization X is demanding that the representative of civilization Y prove something. Y is, therefore, put in dock and must provide proof of her/his “modern-ness”, justify her/him-self to please X. On the other hand, because the answer is not simple when one knows that the Islamic world is not monolithic. The debate could go on forever and that is exactly what happens when you make the mistake of trying to answer. Myself, I cut to the chase by asking X the following question: Is the French Republic compatible with feminism? I can guarantee you one thing: ideological victory is in the answer to this question. In France, 1 woman dies every 3 days as a result of domestic violence. The number rapes per year is estimated around 48 000. Women are underpaid. Women’s pensions are considerably less substantial than those of men. Political, economic and symbolic power remains mostly in the hands of men. True, since the 60’s and 70’s, men share more in household duties: statistically, 3 min more than 30 years ago!! So I ask my question again: are the French Republic and feminism compatible? We would be tempted to say no! Actually, the answer is neither yes nor no. French women liberated French women and it’s thanks to them that the Republic is less macho than it was. The same goes for Arabo-Muslim, African and Asian countries. No more, no less. With, however, one extra challenge: consolidating within women’s struggles the decolonial dimension, that is to say the critique of modernity and eurocentrism.

How to legitimize Islamic feminism? For me, it legitimizes itself. It doesn’t have to pass a feminist exam. The simple fact that Muslim women have taken it up to demand their rights and their dignity is enough for it to be fully recognized. I know, as result of my intimate knowledge of women from the Maghreb and in the diaspora, that “the-submissive-woman” does not exist. She was invented. I know women that are dominated. Submissive ones are rarer!

I would like to conclude with what, in my opinion, should be priorities for decolonial feminism.  You have all heard about Amina Wadud and her involvement in the development of Islamic feminism. She became well known the day she lead the prayer, a role usually reserved for men. Out of context, I would say that it could be thought of as a revolutionary act. However, in an international context that saw the Iranian Revolution and 9/11 (as well as growing Islamophobia, demands that Islam update and modernize itself), a much more ambiguous message was brought to light. Was it answering strong demands, an urgency, the fundamental expectations of women from the Umma? Or were these expectations of the white world? Allow me to dwell on the latter hypothesis. Not that there aren’t any women who find it an injustice that only men be allowed to lead the prayer but because women’s priorities and urgent needs are elsewhere. What do Afghan, Iraqi and Palestinian women want? Peace, the end of the war and the occupation, the rebuilding of their national infrastructures, legal frameworks that guarantee their rights and protect them, access to sufficient food and water, the ability to feed and educate their children under good conditions. What do Muslim women in Europe and more generally those who are immigrants and who, for the most part, live in lower income neighborhoods want? A job, housing, rights that protect them not only from state violence but also men’s violence. They demand respect for their religion, their culture. Why are all of these demands silenced and why does the issue of leading the prayer make its way across the globe when Judaism and Christianity have never really made apparent their own intransigent defense of the equality of sexes? To finish up with this example, I believe that Amina Wadud’s act was, in fact, quite the opposite of what it claimed to be. In reality and independently of the theologian’s own wishes, this act, in my opinion, was counter-productive. It will only be able to adopt a feminist dimension once Islam is equally treated with respect and once the demands to lead the prayer come from Muslim women themselves. It is time to see Muslim men and women how they really are and not how we would like them to be.

I conclude here and hope to have shown the ways in which a true decolonial feminism could benefit women, all women when they, themselves, deem it to be their path to emancipation.

Houria Bouteldja, Madrid, 22 October 2010.

Translated by Amy Fechtmann

I recently went to see the Mocada‘s recent exhibit, They won’t budge: Africans in Europe. The exhibit was made up of mix media pieces : photography, cartography, video and music. The exhibition space is small and cozy which is particularly comforting given the disturbing nature of some of the subjects. There was this one photo by Juan Medina, a photojournalist based in the Canary Islands. In the foreground, one can see a man crawling on the beach, exhausted by the journey he has made across the the Atlantic, most probably, from the Moroccan coast, on a smugglers boat. In the background, three tourists appear to be soaking up the sun in what can only be described as complete and utter indifference !

This photo pretty much sums up for me the way most people in Europe deal with immigration. Most turn a blind eye and ignore the fundamentally racist and xenophobic practices of our governments. France boasts that it has managed to deport 29 000 immigrants from the country in the last year. We are subject to the creation of a ministry of immigration and national identity, whatever the hell that even means! All the while thousands of immigrants are detained in prison-like conditions for absolutely no reason what so ever and shipped off to “their” countries on chartered planes, special agreements are signed with countries like Mali allowing France to deport all West African, or presumed West African citizens, regardless of whether or not they have any ties to Mali what so ever ! Directives are voted at the European level allowing minors to be deported without their parents or legal guardians ! Forbidding entrance and visas to illegal immigrants for a period of five years after their deportation regardless of the fact that their family and loved ones may still be living in Europe !

On the subject of administrative detention, I recently watched a film The Visitor that sheds some light on how difficult it can be for those detained but also those on the outside who are often given hardly any information as to the whereabouts of their loved ones. It takes place in New York City but I believe it is very relevant to what is going on in Europe too.

The song at the top of this post was shown during the exhibit and I find the critique of the present French government that it voices is particularly accurate and the determination of the title “We Won’t Budge !” is great. The words sung by Salif Keita remind me of something Raj Patel said about debt and the Third World during his talk in Boston. He said that it’s funny how the West calculates debt  because if you consider all the plundering of natural resources that took place during the period of colonization, the destruction of local political systems and social organizations, the millions of lives that were taken by arbitrary conquest, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the havoc that contemporary neo-liberal and modernity policies create in most if not all of the above mentioned countries and that is routinely shoved down the throats of “developing” nations through institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and sometimes even the United Nations…it appears pretty clear that what our governments and our ruthless international institutions owe is far greater ! Most of it unfortunately is hard to put a price on and, therefore, too easily dismissed !

Maybe we could start by granting papers to all immigrants, regardless of their backgrounds and reasons for wanting to immigrate and by abolishing Third World debt ? Seems like a good start. Though obviously that would only be the beginning !

I did part of the English subtitles for this excellent documentary by Samir Abdallah and Khéridine Mabrouk. Days after the ceasefire following the Israeli military assault of the Gaza Strip, more commonly known as operation Cast Lead, in January 2009, the filmmakers managed to enter Gaza and film exclusive footage of the aftermath that they turned into the present documentary. To my knowledge it has not yet been released in the United States though while I am here I hope to be able to organize a few showings.

For more information on the situation in Gaza and the Occupied Territories in the West Bank, you can check out the Palestinian Center for Human Rights which is a truly invaluable resource, and the Global Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement.

Pour ce qui est de sa diffusion en France, il me semble qu’il fait le tour des facs et des festivals en ce moment. En région parisienne, le film sera notamment diffuser dans le cadre du Festival Printemps en Palestine 2010, le Vendredi 26 Mars.

Il est également programmé sur France Ô, le Mercredi 10 Février 2010 à 20h35.

A ce sujet, la direction de France télévisions fait actuellement l’objet de pression de la part de certaines personnes qui opposent la diffusion de témoignages aussi francs et directs des Gazaouis sur l’étendue des dégâts et la vie qu’ils et elles tentent de mener dans ces conditions indignes. Ces pressions sont inadmissibles. Le film montre simplement des Palestiniens et des Palestiniennes qui témoignent avec leurs mots, leurs poèmes et leurs chants de la violence de l’agression militaire Israelienne, de leur incompréhension face à tant de destruction, de l’impossibilité à vivre non seulement dans une prison à ciel ouverte depuis des années (n’oublions pas que l’ensemble de la bande est sous siège) mais avec la menace constante d’une nouvelle agression militaire Israelienne.

Il est vrai que ce documentaire est très choquant ! Ce qui est choquant c’est qu’on puisse laisser d’aussi grosses violations des Droits Humains et du Droit International se dérouler dans la plus totale indifférence et impunité. Nos gouvernements (France, Etats-Unis, Royaume-Uni…) sont coupables, l’union Européenne est coupable…et nous le sommes aussi si nous ne nous décidons pas à agir contre ce qui se passe en Palestine depuis plus de 60 ans !

J’ai reçu aujourd’hui ce mail qui vient du réalisateur lui-même, Samir Abdallah qui est à diffuser largement. J’espère que vous regarderez le film et qu’ensuite vous déciderez de le soutenir car ces témoignages sont essentiels et doivent être entendus et diffusés !

From: frontieres@hotmail.com

Bonjour
France Télévisions fait l’objet de pressions pour déprogrammer le film
Gaza-strophe*
dont la diffusion a été reportée sur France Ô le mercredi 10 février
2010 à 20h35 suite aux événements tragiques survenus en Haïti.

Monsieur Patrick de Carolis
Président Directeur Général du Groupe France Télévisions
7, esplanade Henri de France
75907 Paris Cedex 15

France Ô – Service Relations Téléspectateurs
7 esplanade Henri-de-France
75907 PARIS Cedex 15

One of the pieces, I found the most meaningful to me was Between The Lines by Ariana Boussard-Reifel. The core of the piece is a book from which all of the words in black ink have been painstakingly removed. They lay in a pile an inch or so from the book itself. The book is in fact a fundamental text of the white supremacist movement.

The piece, I believe, demonstrates the absurdity of a world in which white  and black are surgically removed from one another. Symbolically pushing such a racist ideology  to the extreme, which is in fact it’s ultimate goal, Ariana Boussard-Reifel shows us just how absurd such an enterprise would be. The application of such precepts would render our realities completely meaningless and unintelligible, just like the white wordless book !

Another possibility could be that Boussard-Reifel was performing a sort of artistic surgery upon the ideology itself by removing all the malignancies from the book, thus, demonstrating that for such an ideology to be sane, it would inevitably have to cease to exist. This is achieved when one contemplates the dissected pages. It almost appears harmless in it’s glass show case. Unfortunately, racism runs far deeper than the ink on those pages !

Nevertheless, I found the piece visually and politically compelling. I imagine there are more than two ways of looking at it. I wish there had have been a lengthier explanation of the piece and the artists intentions. If anyone has any other ideas, comments are more than welcome ! I wonder what you all read between the lines …

The idea is simple ! You make the very political decision to move your money from the big corporate banks that were recently bailed out with American tax payers dollars and move it to a smaller community bank or credit union.

The website provides information about how the idea came about and also helps you find a local alternative for your banking needs !

We so readily believe that the distinct communities and neighborhoods that have come into being and that somewhat rigidly follow racial and/or ethnic divides, are just an extension of the saying ” Birds of a feather, stick together”, some natural occurrence, which conveniently doesn’t allow us to question it’s origins because they are so obvious. I am doubtful this is the case. I think rather that an ensemble of factors, among which the demeaning portrayal of certain populations within the the United States, inter-personal and institutional racism, ideas of national identity and mythical norms as Audre Lorde put it, work in particular ways to divide the inhabitants of a city, a country, the world…and ultimately lead them to despise one another in an attempt to pacify them all.

I bring this up because I recently witnessed it first hand. I was looking for a new room to rent, at the moment I live near the Q train stop at Cortelyou road but the rent is a bit pricey so I was looking to change. I visited a room in a little house on Brooklyn Ave., on the wrong side of Flatbush Ave. What struck me most while walking the six blocks from the subway station was the electrical cables. It is just incredible, the infrastructure looks so poorly maintained and there are so many different cables hanging over the road leading into the houses, it looks like a haphazard spider’s web scrawling across the street overhead. The pavements are cracked and overgrown with weeds in some places, the roads look worn and uneven. These are all things that should be funded and maintained by the city. Why such a discrepancy between the two neighborhoods ? Does the fact that this is an Afro-Carribean neighborhood have something to do with it ?

In Cortelyou there is a food coop near by, a couple of parks, well maintained streets and a growing white population that is fleeing the high rents of the city for a quieter and cheaper Brooklyn abode. I imagine that in a few years, rents and housing in Cortelyou will have risen (if that is not already the case) making it increasingly difficult to preserve the diversity that still exists. Just like Park Slope, Williamsburg and other neighborhoods it will probably become the next victim of gentrification. The creation of these lovely urban havens does have a price, but when you are white you rarely pay that price. We aren’t the ones who are forced to leave (because rising rents, I believe, don’t leave many families any other option. It isn’t a choice when economically you have no other option) to cheaper, often badly maintained outskirt neighborhoods where there are no parks, no organic food coops and no diversity. Where the living conditions are worse and infrastructure just happens to be so severely neglected by the municipality ; where soon enough probably prospectors will yet again make millions on the backs of those very same communities to cater for the needs of  yet another wave of middle-class city migrants.

When we are sitting in our cozy living rooms in Park Slope at some friend’s house, sipping some expensive wine, talking about that « kind » of neighborhood and all the problems we can’t resolve, we are blind to the privilege. We don’t see the impact we have on this kind of urban phenomenon. We don’t see that we got the better paying job and that that is how we can afford our lovely hardwood floor flat in Park Slope. We don’t see that the neighborhood, is almost exclusively white. We don’t see that there is not one person of color in that sitting room to voice an opinion that is different from our own and so important to hear. We don’t even see that we are white. That is also part of the privilege : we don’t see it, we don’t feel it, we ignore those who suffer from it…because we can. It could very easily not affect my life. I don’t have to live on Brooklyn Ave if I don’t want to. I can afford to spend a little more money on my rent if I want to live in a « nice » neighborhood. I can make a choice because before hand a whole string events due in part to my race and class allow me to. What I am wondering about now, is what about the majority, don’t be mistaken, they are a majority, of people who not only don’t get to make those choices, even worse, they suffer the consequences of the decisions that I make ?

I decided upon these three methodological and epistemological focused articles, because through the class readings and lectures, I have come to understand the importance of methodolgy and epistemology with regards to understanding gender and feminism within the African context. This does not mean that I consider the other readings secondary but rather that to be able to have any critical perspective on African gender scholarship, one must fully understand the context in which it is produced. For me, this is what proved most difficult to grasp, coming from a very western educational background, but at the same time, was also the most enlightening. Indeed, I feel now far more inclined to question what I know and how I have come to know it with regards to Africa and issues of gender in African societies. It has  began to destroy pervasive anti-africanisms, I thought to be acceptable until not so long ago, and has allowed me to understand that though I am most familiar with western scholarship, this does not necessarily mean that it is the only valid source. My world went from something terribly black and white, to a more diverse and nuanced reality, that I believe to be far more accurate, though much more problematic. I would hope that these would be some of the conclusions that other students would draw from these readings and that would prove very useful to them in future Africana Studies.

To further insist upon the conclusions I have drawn from these articles, I will proceed by undertaking a comparative review of the main ideas addressed in the articles. Firstly, I will take a deeper look at how Africa and Africans[1] are commonly rendered in Western scholarship, which will then allow me to present some of the authors’ attempts at redressing such inaccurate depictions, notably through the establishment of a social and historical African context. This, in turn, will allow me to broach the subject of how contemporary Africanist scholarship is advancing in the the construction of a comprehensive epistemological and methodological framework through which to understand the concept of gender within the African context.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty advances, in her article Under Western Eyes, that Western feminist scholarship constructs third world women as a homogenous group. This means that it disregards class and cultural contexts in favor of a uniquely gendered perspective. It is not per se a biological essentialist categorization, but through the basis of  « secondary sociological and anthropological universals »[2] creates a group that appears uniform and coherent when it is not in reality. It does so notably through it’s analysis of third world women as it studies various cases of groups of powerless women, rather than trying to understand the specificities and complexities of  power relations, within any given situation. This homogenization is problematic for it assumes that there exists « an ahistorical universal unity among women based on a generalized notion of their subordination »[3]. This strips all third world women of the specificities of their situations, how they feel and understand their oppression, ultimately their very identities and any agency had. The creation of such a homogenous identity, is constructed because it supports Western feminist scholarship’s universalist belief that patriarchy and it’s oppression of women functions very much the same way in all societies, thus, reducing third world women’s identities, so as to better draw similarities with Western women’s oppression. This is also carried out at a larger methodological level, through western feminist scholarship’s analysis of women’s oppression within Third World countries. Cultural practices, such as veiling, but also concepts like reproduction, the sexual division of labor, family, marriage, household and patriarchy are often looked at through purely western paradigms that are culturally limited to the West and more often than not irrelevant in the analysis of societies whose social structure and cultural understanding of such concepts is very different, sometimes even non existent, at least not in the way it is expressed in Western theory. These Western paradigms often ignore the multiple contexts and societies in which these practices take place, discarding the cultural and historical specificities of such acts. Mohanty, to further prove her point, uses the example of veiling in Iran that, at one time, was carried out as an oppositional and revolutionary act of solidarity with working class women but that, in another historical context, after the Islamic Revolution, became a coercive institutional mandate. In western scholarship, such subtlety is ignored and the agency of Iranian women in the first case is totally denied.

A direct consequence of using an identity homogenizing paradigm, is that it leads to the belief in a certain amount of inaccurate stereotypes that are systematically projected on these populations. Oyekan Owomoyela argues that Africans are perceived in western scholarship, and also in popular culture, as being poor, weak, illiterate and almost always violent. This, he believes, proves the limited approach Western scholarship offers when attempting to understand the third world, and specifically African societies. Indeed, literacy he argues, for instance, is a western value, in traditional African societies, oral transmission is the rule, transcriptions of philosophical, historical and scientific discoveries are not characteristic of traditional African societies, this led Europeans to believe that intellectual discourse in the fields of philosophy, history and science never took place in Africa, which is not true. In the West, literacy is represented « as an epistemic necessity, not simply a condition for the possibility of science, history or philosophy »[4], therefore, allowing Western scholarship to claim that Africa has produced nothing of relevance in the fields of science, so prized by their own culture. This image of ignorance projected on Africans is further enforced by travel accounts and even scholarship, in which Africans are depicted as grotesque, violent beings, whose humanity is often questioned. They are portrayed as « seemingly demented » and inclined to « engage in an orgy of mass murder »[5] for any given reason. Another favored image of Africanity is that of a society that’s people possess « an innate perversity, especially in gender relations and sexual matters »[6] which, more often than not, leads to the belief that African society and specifically African men are fundamentally misogynistic. These stereotypes, among numerous others, give a profoundly distorted picture of what Africa is and who it’s people really are. Western scholarship, consciously and/or unconsciously portrays every African trait, or what is constructed as an African trait, as a perversion, an aliment, which ultimately assimilates Africanity with pathology. Western scholarship has a vocation, to point out and cure these people through the scholarship they produce and the development industry that it fuels. Nowhere, are African voices to be heard in these enterprises and it is the unequal power relations within the production of scholarship pertaining to Africa, that allows western ideas on the matter, to go unquestioned.

Indeed on this subject, Mohanty further insists that  the universalist and reductionist concepts and methodology used by Western feminist scholars allow them to judge Third World women according to western norms and moralities. Inevitably, third world women are defined as «religious (read not ‘progressive’), family oriented (read ‘traditional’), legal minors ( read ‘they-are-still-not-conscious-of their-rights’), illiterate ( read ‘ignorant’), domestic (read ‘backward’) and sometimes revolutionary (read ‘their-country-is-in-a-state-of-war ; they-must-fight) »[7] in comparison to Western feminists who are not only conscious of their own oppression, but also believe to be more conscious of third world women’s oppression than the latter are themselves. The nature of such an enterprise is profoundly imperialistic on behalf of Western feminists and is further enforced by the fact that Western feminist scholars have privileged, if not hegemonic, access to educational institutions, the material means to produce scholarship, get it published and be recognized as an authority in the field, resources that very few third world feminists have at their disposal. Mohanty believes that despite the initial wishes of western feminist scholarship, to free their third world « sisters », it does very much the opposite by stripping them of their individual identities and voices, and manipulating their experiences so that they better represent the political needs, of western feminists, that is to have a homogenous group identified as women that has more political weight, because of it’s universalism, than they would have standing alone.

This situation in Feminist and African Studies scholarship has led many Africanist scholars to take a more critical approach to western scholarship and also pushed them to reconsider the existing framework of the field. To accomplish this, most believe it necessary to research and present the African context in all of of it’s historical and social complexities.

Indeed, acknowledging the specific African context would allow scholars to challenge, and eventually consider obsolete, the contemporary idea of Africa as an ahistorical and socially crystalized and homogenous entity. There, is however, an obstacle to this enterprise, that Owomoyela refers to as the « constitution of authority ». African scholarship must not only speak a truth, it must also be recognized as a valid contribution to scholarship in the field, this is far more difficult than one may initially think, for African methodologies and sources are constantly brought into question by western scholarship precepts that believe their unconventional approach to be fundamentally flawed, thus considering any factual content unfounded. Africanist scholars are up against a whole institution that is particularly hostile to their specific methodology and use of unconventional sources. In other words, to be considered an authority in the field one can only abide by Western methodology even if it is irrelevant in the context of African Studies, this reflects not only the fundamentally unequal power relations within the field, but also the quasi universal Western bias, in scholarship, economy, culture and even human worth. This is notably expressed, in the refusal to consider any oral tradition sources, such as proverbs, an integral part of African heritage, as a valid source, but also the personal experience within the African context of the author. Owomoyela advances that « the disparagement of direct experience as qualification to speak on the experience itself, and preference instead for mediated testimony, amount to a curious and perverted scheme for hierarchizing evidence »[8], a hierarchy that is imposed by Western conventions. This has not, however, prevented africanist scholars from undertaking the task of advancing a more comprehensive African context.

Filomina Steady has actively contributed to researching a specific African framework, for gender studies in particular. She maintains that one can only begin to undertake research in contemporary African issues, once one has drawn up an accurate understanding of the history of Africa. Historical factors, an understanding of contemporary global power relations and how they interact with one another is essential when trying to present the complexity of Africa, as it exists today. Steady argues that the effects of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonialism and what is referred to today as economic neo-colonialism have not been sufficiently researched and their repercussions on contemporary African society are virtually unknown. Moreover, one must also acknowledge that the study of Africa up until now, and still today, is often motivated by personal interest and hardly ever with the African people in mind. During the colonial era, it was used to reinforce colonial domination and racism, which in itself justified the colonial enterprise. Anthropology played a paramount role, with it’s belief in social darwinism, Structural/functionalism and ‘acculturation’ theories, it successfully justified some of the most dehumanizing practices. Africans became savages in need of civilizing, the salvatory mission of the colonialist, often referred to as the ‘white man’s burden’, was born. Because they fundamentally believed their enterprise to be just, colonialists « ignored the lack of free choice and decision-making and the role of coercion »[9] their administration forced upon local populations, « in effect, colonialism not only blocked indigenous processes of decision-making, it also destroyed indigenous processes of knowledge generation »[10].

These theories and practices still profoundly effect Africa, they have spawned a new tendancy which is expressed most potently today, through the neo-colonialist enterprise of western economic institutions and the theories they produce. « Today, neo-liberal paradigms justify globalization in much the same way their antecedents, namely social darwinism, modernization theory and structural/functionalism justified colonialism. Liberal-oriented international studies privilege Western political institutions within a global political system dominated by Western capital and patriarchal ideologies. »[11]. It is most notably expressed through the multiple ‘development’ projects, that African governments finance with hefty loans from these very same institutions and that both actors know could never be repayed.

It is this context, Steady believes, that should be considered when undertaking research about Africa, for it is more often than not ignored. It allows the scholar to fully distinguish what is authentically African from what has been effected by very pervasive historical and economic factors.

It is upon this foundation, also, that Steady hopes, Africanist scholars will build a more comprehensive epistemological and methodological framework to understand African societies and more specifically how gender is understood within them.

For this to occur, Mohanty advances that it is essential that all scholarship produced by Western academies « must be seen and examined precisely in terms of it’s inscription »[12] within the greater context of western cultural hegemony and the unequal power relations such a context implies. She insists on the political effects such writing may have beyond the mere intellectual realms, for in the eyes of most third world feminists « the dominant ‘representations’ of  western feminism »[13] become conflated with imperialism. Mohanty, leaning on the thoery of Anouar Abdel-Malek, further insists that «  a particular world balance of power within which any analysis of culture, ideology, and socio-economic conditions has to necessarily be situated » and that therefore « western feminist scholarship cannot avoid the challenge of situating itself and examining it’s role in such a global economic and political framework », which up until now it has not done, preferring rather to claim it’s hegemonic views as the only possible authority.

This particular criticism of western scholarship introduces a shift in how one can understand a concept such as gender in the African context. It allows Africanist scholars to question Western theory on the issue and formulate a specifically African take on it. Owomoyela argues that the belief that there is a conflictual element between men and women, a prevalent precept of western feminism, is « patently un-african, for in general the communalism of traditional African societies succeeded precisely because it afforded opportunities for open discussion and resolution of even the most fractious of matters of concern to the community »[14]. Indeed, gender relations in many African societies are based on concepts of complementarity, mutual dependency and a harmonious balance between the two sexes. Both are considered equally important to the upkeep of society and even though for western scholarship « the mere existence of a sexual division of labour is taken to be proof of the oppression of women in various societies »[15], this is not always the case, more often than not, it « results from a confusion between and collapsing together of the descriptive explanatory potential of the concept of the sexual division of labour »[16]. Indeed, in some African societies the division can be synonymous with economic independence through access to trade and specific crops. Owomoyela is concerned by « the strategy of feminist whiggism that demonizes Africanity by rewriting the African past as always gender conflicted, and characterized by a perversely inhuman patriarchal system »[17] and wonders if « Africa and African Studies have become casualties of the gender wars, and that single-issue feminism has become enlisted, unwittingly perhaps, in the campaign against Africa and Africanity ». Understanding gender in the African context may be very different, maybe even be unrecognizable, for an orthodox western understanding of gender.

Steady goes one step further and challenges the very relevance of gender in African societies. Indeed she believes it to be a western export used as an analytical tool for policy making in Africa and clearly expresses yet again the domination of western terminologies in non-western contexts, to which they may very well be irrelevant. She further insists that « the term ‘gender’ carries a Western bias. It tends to be myopic, inventive, and can obscure other differences. Because it is Western, it reveals white western middle-class biases and obscures other differences based on race, class, ethnicity, religion, sexuality and so forth »[18] and, like a lot of western scholarship, fails to acknowledge the fact that women experience oppression very differently, whether in the United States or Africa. Moreover, for Steady, the term gender also conveys an underlying dichotomy of socially constructed male and female roles. This is something that African social structures often blur, with concepts such as female husbands, non gender specific divinities or non gender specific traits and positions within society that, in the West, would systematically be understood as pertaining to one gender and not the other. Steady, using the work of another author, Oyeronke Oyewumi, points out that  « the creation of ‘woman’ as a category was one of the very first accomplishments of the colonial state, since in precolonial societies, male and female had multiple identities that were not based on anatomy »[19]. It is for these reasons, among others, that Steady claims that understanding gender in an African context is irrelevant.

I have hopefully managed to successfully articulate some of the epistemological and methodological debates that are currently key issues in the understanding, and also production of knowledge, about Africa, it’s people and more specifically African women. These debates far from being resolved are ongoing disagreements within the field that need to be addressed by all Africanist and Feminist scholars, especially those intent on using the research to better the lives of those it studies. Though it appears impossible to question the authority of Western scholarship and also the greater Western political hegemony in which it is inscribed, I think it important to keep in mind that studying a colonized subject, in the hopes that one might be able to introduce change in their and ultimately our own lives cannot not be undertaken if the very scholarship one is producing is imperialistic in itself. It is up to us as future scholars to be critical of our own backgrounds for as Audre Lorde, so potently, reminds us « the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house »[20].

[2] Under Western Eyes : Feminist Scholarship and colonial Discourses, Chandra Talpan Mohanty, Feminist Review, N°30, p. 65

[3] Under Western Eyes : Feminist Scholarship and colonial Discourses, Chandra Talpan Mohanty, Feminist Review, N°30, p. 72

[4] With Friends Like These…A Critique of Pervasive Anti-Africanisms in Current African Studies Epistemology and Methodolgy, by Oyekan Owomoyela, African Studies Review, Vol. 37, N°3, p. 80

[5] Ibid, p. 83

[6] Ibid, p. 84

[7] Under Western Eyes : Feminist Scholarship and colonial Discourses, Chandra Talpan Mohanty, Feminist Review, N°30, p. 80

[8] With Friends Like These…A Critique of Pervasive Anti-Africanisms in Current African Studies Epistemology and Methodolgy, by Oyekan Owomoyela, African Studies Review, Vol. 37, N°3, p. 91

[9] An Investigative Framework for Gender Research in Africa in the New Millenium, by Filomina Chioma Steady, p. 2

[10] Ibid

[11] Ibid, p. 1

[12] Under Western Eyes : Feminist Scholarship and colonial Discourses, Chandra Talpan Mohanty, Feminist Review, N°30, p. 63

[13] Ibid, p. 62

[14] With Friends Like These… by Oyekan Owomoyela, African Studies Review, Vol. 37, N°3, p. 89

[15] Under Western Eyes : Feminist Scholarship and colonial Discourses, Chandra Talpan Mohanty, Feminist Review, N°30, p. 76

[16] Ibid

[17] With Friends Like These… by Oyekan Owomoyela, African Studies Review, Vol. 37, N°3, p. 92

[18] An Investigative Framework for Gender Research in Africa in the New Millenium, by Filomina Chioma Steady, p. 4

[19] Ibid, p. 5

[20] Sister Outsider : Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, Crossing Press, 2007, p. 110