JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies ISSN: 1530-5686 Cultural Epistemologies of Motherhood: Refining the Concept ‘Mothers’

Nkiru Nzegwu

For two consecutive academic sessions, 2001 and 2002, Harpur College of Binghamton University funded two interdisciplinary workshops to examine the social practices that play a significant role in understanding motherhood. The first workshop focused on recent works in the field of African and African Diaspora women’s studies. Though motherhood was the entry point for theoretical investigation, the workshops also examined other family-related relationships and the importance of these in the formulation of theories of identity and personhood. The following set of questions initiated participants’ discussions: What are the prevailing conceptions of motherhood in Africa, the Caribbean and the United States? What does the articulated concept of ‘mother’ tell us about family history, family identity and family cohesiveness? Discussions highlighted cultural attitudes about motherhood in several countries—Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Jamaica, Haiti, the United States and Poland—as well as the similarities and differences in mothering styles among Africans, African-Americans, and Caribbeans.

In the attempt to explicate the nature of Africa-centered structures of motherhood, the discourse shifted to personal experiences of mothers, to the impact of professional careers on women’s decisions to become mothers, and to the kinds of systems that are in place in communities to support mothers. Two trajectories of investigation were opened: one, centered on theoretical work in the area of matrilineal leadership, and the other, focused on how a community publicly enforces cultural values. This led to discussions about the values that are employed in raising children and to the phenomenon of delayed motherhood among African American professional women. This latter topic attracted a great deal of discussion as to why, in the United States, upwardly mobile African American women in graduate school and new faculty hires seem to view ‘motherhood’ as limiting their option whereas in the Caribbean and Africa the reverse is the case.

African and Caribbean professional women do not seem to accept the validity of the opposition between motherhood and work or of motherhood and graduate studies. Within the academia, and even in U.S. academe, African women immigrants in these positions were more likely to have children, possibly that they are already in relationships that compel them to have children. However, the issue boils down to why one set of women fail to see any tension between professional growth and motherhood while another set does. Prior to the devastating impact of globalization, motherhood did not attract negative overtones in African societies. It was highly valued and a desired activity. For the Igbos, for example, society was organized around the principle that people are a community’s most valuable resource” azuka ego “siblings are much more important than wealth”; maduka “greatness is dependent or predicated on people.” Wealth was measured in terms of human beings, and Igbo societies, like many other African ones, were organized around the need to have children. The prime importance of most societies was to bring forth, nurture and expand their human wealth. Mothers were central within this ontological scheme, and their reproductive labor was highly valued. Indeed, the centrality of mothers’ role in reproduction led to their being seen as Ifi Amadiume described “the source of the spring, isi mmili” (1987, 84).

It is instructive that unlike in Western societies, where reproductive labor was devalued and motherhood was the basis of women’s systemic disadvantage especially in the labor market, it was the basis of women’s empowerment in many African societies. As Signe Arnfred reminded us in her essay in this issue, work and products that are not for sale are neither valued nor do they count in the calculation of growth rates and the Gross National Products (GNPs). From an economic point of view, they are invisible. By contrast, reproductive labor was highly valued among the Igbos. In fact, the attainment of motherhood for married African women moved them out of the subordinate position of “wife” to the exalted category of “mother.” This new social ascension and loss of an old identity was marked by a new title, “Nne X” where “X” is the name of the first born. ‘Nne’ is mother. She emerges for the first time at the birth of her first child. For this crucial reason more than anything else motherhood experience identity is tied to the actual delivery of a child. Conception establishes a state of possibility that is actualized only upon the birth of the child. Safe delivery is a necessary requirement for the assumption of the identity of mother. Unlike in the nuclear family context, this exalted position of nne is not juxtaposed to any other role but stands on its own. According to B. M. Akunne, an Igbo-Nri cultural historian, the tie of motherhood “Nne” symbolically dominates nna [father]” because it is “the true spirit of unity that binds persons” (Akunne 1977, 60).

The ideology of motherhood raises a question about whether or not the features of motherhood can extended to non-mothers. In other words, can motherhood be thought of as a transitive verb? The theme of the second year workshop—“Motherhood as Verb”—explored that issue. The conference that closed the workshop asked participants to reflect on whether the trait and duties of motherhood is tied exclusively to conception, pregnancy and birth. A workshop participant felt that there should be more to it since most of the people who have children or who are thinking about having children should not. Another wanted to determine how to describe a father who was more maternal than the biological mother of a child. Given the positive value that is placed in mother’s duties shouldn’t such a man be called “mother”? If the answer is no because motherhood is tied to childbirth, then why should the term be applied to women who have never had children, but who are perceived as nurturing and maternal? Since the latter suggests that there are other grounds for assigning the name ‘mother’, what could they possibly be? After all, we did call women who have never had children but have participated in rearing children, “mother,” “community mothers” or “othermothers,” to use Patricia Hill Collins’s terminology. Why not men? Considering that a small but growing number of men with working spouses are in charge of their children’s daily care, how should we characterize such men? If we withhold the term ‘mother’ from these men, to what are we tying the word, the female anatomy? If mothering and motherhood is about the care and nurturing of children, why should a man who is more nurturing than a biological mother not be described as mother? In short, can ‘mother’ become a verb that describes a set of activities rather than just a noun that denotes a specific role or subject? Or is the basic premise of the question misguided in the first place. If so, why?

This Issue

Some papers from the Binghamton workshops are part of this issue that includes the essays of participants from the Images of Motherhood conference sponsored by the Nordic Africa Institute, in collaboration with the Department of Religious Studies of Uppsala University, and the Department of History of Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar, Senegal. Bringing together the two sets of papers opens the forum to a wider range of motherhood experiences from the African Diaspora, explicitly, African American. These experiences help to show the unique ways in which motherhood is tied to specific sociohistorical values of the culture within which it is situated.

Niara Sudarkasa starts with the proposition that motherhood is first and foremost defined, affected and impacted by the type of family structure or kinship grouping in which it is lodged. She focuses on the contrasting types of family structure in explaining some of the differences in behavior and ideologies associated with motherhood. She looks at motherhood in the context of nuclear and extended family structures that developed in Europe and Africa, respectively, but recognizes that when those family structures have been transported to other cultural contexts, transformations in motherhood and other familial roles and relationships would occur. Her main argument is that the images, behavior and values associated with motherhood, and other kinship relationships within nuclear and extended families, reflect the constraints and elasticities that derive from the family structures themselves. Thus, the nuclear family with its relative isolation, its relative insulation, and its inward-looking philosophy that stresses the “husbanding” of resources unto itself, imposes different constraints on women in their roles as wives, mothers, and daughters, than does the extended family, with its expansive, inclusive network that values the sharing of resources beyond the conjugal family unit. On the other hand, extended families also impose their own types of constraints on women as mothers, wives and daughters, and both nuclear and extended family structures have built-in elasticities that help to account for differences in motherhood and other roles and relationships.

Picking up on the issue of nomenclature used in describing families, Nkiru Nzegwu revisits the legitimacy of the ‘patriliny’ terminology used in characterizing some Igbo societies. As Sudarkasa had argued if motherhood is defined and understood by the type of family structure or kinship groupings in which it is situated, then if a family structure is mischaracterized, our understanding of motherhood would correspondingly be affected. Her point is not that there will be no definition of motherhood, but that that definition will be wrong for that society. Defining motherhood in relation to an inapplicable family structure would dramatically limit or alter the roles, rights, and power of mothers. Nzegwu examines some Igbo communities that have long been described as patrilineal to determine the accuracy of that characterization, and to ascertain in what ways the ideology of motherhood in such a society challenges the prevailing characterization of the society. The questions that set the pace for the study are: Does the fact that descent is reckoned through the father imply the existence of patriliny? Did Igbos in the northwestern part of Igboland really trace descent through the father and in what ways were the societies both patrilineal and patriarchal? What is the status and role of mothers in the Igbo family system? And in what way did the ideology of motherhood point to a different character of family and social organization? Answers to these questions have serious implications for received ethnographic wisdom because they provide a new understanding of how descent runs through the line of mothers.

A different set of issues emerge once we theoretically locate to South Africa. We engage the issue of motherhood and responsible citizenship. A central task of a democratic society is to produce responsible citizens and to encourage active citizenship. Dora Daniels examined the lives of ssixteen mothers residing in an informal settlement in Gauteng province, South Africa. The mothers participated in a two-year study on community building and leadership roles. As part of the empirical study, the subjects recorded visual data on their community. Drawing on the mothers’ analysis of the photographs and also on interviews and observational data on their roles, Daniels discusses the traditional positioning of women as mothers. By using photography as a primary research tool access was gained into the personal world of these community mothers, without physically invading their private spaces. The mothers remained in control of the subject-matter of study. They chose what to photograph; they decided when to photograph; and they photographed people, daily events and community occasions they felt comfortable about. In a consecutive workshop on community building the photos, as well as their own drawings became pedagogical tools that provided deeper insight into the women’s ways of dealing with their multiple roles. Although motherhood was not the focus of the study, it was interwoven in all aspects of that which the women reported on. Daniels’ article discusses how the discourses on motherhood came together with the participants’ political involvement, community building and leadership initiatives.

Exploring the Ghanaian social reality, sociologist Akosua Adomako Ampofo probes the way that mothers who classify themselves as members of a social category that is distinct from that of their children can contest and disrupt hierarchies of inequality by challenging racist ideologies and constructions. Drawing from a larger study that explores the lives of non-Ghanaian women and men who have migrated to Ghana, she extracts the mothering experiences of white and black non-Ghanaian women living in Ghana, who are the mothers, or potential mothers of Ghanaian children. Asserting that children from “biracial” or multicultural families vary greatly in the extent to which they identify with “Ghanaian” culture, she discusses the personal and racial politics of non-Ghanaian mothers, and how they transmit particular cultural identities to their children. Ampofo examines how “white” and “black” non-Ghanaian women experience options to become mothers, how they construct their own cultural and mother identities, and how this informs their mothering practices both consciously and less consciously and what messages they have imparted about “race” and/or colour? Have they actively sought to expose their children to any particular “culture”?, she queries. What are their own understandings about the mother role and do they see any differences between this and the role of a mother among the dominant culture? Ultimately, what do racial politics and culture have to do with mothering? Because the concept of race is so central to the current analyses, she discusses the problematic surrounding its construction and use, she points out the ways in which the situation of multi-cultural, multi-racial and multi-ethnic people have been located in the discourse.

Moving to the racialized environment of the United States, Felice Lee-Jones addresses the role of race in mothering and argues that mothering in the public sphere is a result of the double entendre inherent in poverty. Poor mothering has become synonymous with mothering in poverty. She argues that although the institutionalization of the family has been theorized as a source of isolation and danger for women, this is not the case for African Americans and poor women for whom it is public. White middle class feminist theorists egotistically or ethnocentrically focused upon themselves, rather than upon the forces outside of the home that so persuasively invaded it during that same period. The home did indeed become a public venue for women not privileged by class or race. Lee-Jones’ provides evidence that the white feminists’ reaction to the dichotomized public and private spheres for mothers and fathers was conditioned by racial and class privilege. The isolation of the home may have been a pertinent issue for white, middle-class mothers, but an analysis of child-welfare practice in the United States demonstrates that intrusion into the home was a not-so-covert attempt to sanction and control poor and/or women of color and to indict their mothering practices.

Entering into the world of middle class white women, clinical psychologist and gender specialist, Lisa Jeannes and T. Shefer, explore the motherhood discourses employed by their white South African participants, and how these contribute to their experiences of motherhood. A key intention of the study is to explore participants' perceptions regarding themselves as mothers and the sense they make of their experiences of motherhood. Jeannes and Shefer interpret these perceptions from a feminist perspective in order to ultimately empower white women to create a notion of motherhood that suits them. The study is therefore fundamentally located in a feminist paradigm. It deems the paradigm suitable because it fulfils a purpose of the study, which is, that women be “given a voice” (Gordon, 1990; Burns, 2000). According to Jeannes and Shefer, women are used to being told how motherhood should be experienced and embodied, with input from family, friends, media, medical professionals and even strangers being the norm. It would be an empowering experience for the participating white mothers to share their own experiences and opinions regarding motherhood.

In concluding, I would like to share the contribution of a participant to the Binghamton workshop. Cynthia Sedgwick’s reflection on motherhood from the standpoint of a daughter underscores the specialness of a mother-daughter bond that speaks to the value of the motherhood. She states: “Perhaps I am simply perplexed by the power of this thing motherhood as both an outsider and as someone standing inside of my own quizzical odyssey. What I will say is that my relationship with my mother has been one of the most powerful of my life. It has transcended much and has been made stronger by a series of profound events. She shares responsibility for the parts of me that I love as she shares responsibility for the parts of me that I do not. She was never “unconditional” and always idealistic. In spite of our struggles, that umbilical thread always seemed to permeate our connection as mother and daughter and even now in the midst of our adult friendship that thread is unbroken and continues to feed our souls the bitter sweet potion of motherhood.”

Bibliography

Amadiume, Ifi. Afrikan Matriarchal Foundations: The Igbo Case (London, Karnak House, 1987).

Burns, D. (2000). Feminism, Psychology and Social Policy: Constructing Political Boundaries at the Grassroots. Feminism and Psychology, 10(3), 367-380.

Gordon, T. (1990). Feminist mothers. London: Macmillan Education Limited.

Copyright © 2004 Africa Resource Center, Inc.

Citation Format

JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: Issue 5, 2004.