Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies (2001) ISSN: 1530-5686 BETWEEN DIVAS AND DIMPERS: A REVIEW OF IFI AMADIUME’S DAUGHTERS OF THE GODDESS, DAUGHTERS OF IMPERIALISM: AFRICAN WOMEN, CULTURE, POWER & DEMOCRACY, London, Zed, 2000

Biko Agozino

Nkiru Nzegwu set tough (perhaps unnecessarily too tough in tone) new standards for the internal criticism of the work of fellow African scholars in her review of Ifi Amadiume’s Reinventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion, Culture. It is difficult for someone to do justice to yet another book by Ifi Amadiume without demonstrating awareness of what Nzegwu has termed a ‘thorough reading’ for ‘a more effective critique’ in her response to Tola Olu Pearce’s appreciation of her initial intervention (see http://africaresource.com/vbpro/war21/entries.html)

The harsh tone of Nzegwu’s critique of the valuable work of Amadiume may get in the way of the vital points that the critic was trying to make. In summary, what Nzegwu argues is that if we start our analysis of African culture with gender as the central epistemological concept, we buy into the western metaphysics of inequality without realizing it. Consequently, she insists that any analysis of gender relations in Africa should recognize how much those relations were formed and transformed by the slave trade, colonialism, Christian missionaries (and by extension, Islamic clerics), and neocolonialism. She concluded that such historical specificity would make it possible to distinguish intrusive patriarchal traits from what is often represented as Matriarchal African cultures. She added that even in Igboland, the social construction of life differs from place to place, and differs substantially from the underlying assumptions of a matriarchal scheme, making it difficult to construe these societies as matriarchal.

Having said all that, I must confess that I found Daughters of the Goddess, Daughters of Imperialism to be an interesting read. As the title suggests, the author tried to theorize a complete picture of the contrasting situations of African women today. As the historical standards of Nzegwu indicated, this is a very ambitious project that ranges from religion (the Goddess) through political economy (imperialism) to culture, power and democracy. The huge breath of issues covered in the book is perhaps responsible for the fact that the reader would finish the book with an urge to find out more about the thoughts provoked by the author, as is expected of all good authors, no matter how voluminous or exhaustive their texts are.

For a start, the reader would like to know more about the Goddess of the title. What Goddess is this? Amadiume differentiates between African women like herself who are activist scholars on the one hand, and establishment women who married into positions of power and influence, on the other hand. The former are the Daughters of the Goddess and the latter are the Daughters of Imperialism. However, it is not clear still what Goddess she is referring to with the definite article the. Judging from the title of Amadiume’s first book, Male daughters, Female Husbands (roughly, nwanyi nwoke or nwanyi kwu amu, a woman who has balls, in Igbo, indicating an equal opportunities conception of patriarchy among the otherwise radically republican Igbo people), it is likely that she is once again translating directly from the Igbo language when she calls herself a daughter of the Goddess. In Igbo, the equivalent would be agbara nwanyi or literally, goddess woman. This is a term reserved for exceptional women who mystify the world by excelling against the odds. Among the Igbo, there are many gods but just one Goddess, Agbara, hence the use of a definite article by Amadiume.

If this is the case, Amadiume (the first Igbo woman to earn a tenured full professorship in an Ivy League college without compromising her ideological commitment to the oppressed) is qualified to call herself the daughter of the goddess given her track records of achievements that need not be recounted here. However, the cultural and historical specificity of this term raises the kind of doubts that Nzegwu was referring to. How applicable is the term to all organically connected African female intellectual-activists and how peculiar is the term to African women? As an anthropologist, Amadiume would be the first to warn that it smacks of ethnocentrism to generalize for all African women from the rich metaphorical language of the Igbo. As she demonstrated in the appendix that sit uncomfortably up-front after the preface, ‘there are about 395 languages and about 250 ethnic groups divided into about 90,000 named communities’ in Nigeria alone.

The danger of such an apparent over-generalization is clear when we follow the example of Biodun Jeyifo (The Truthful Lie) in comparing works of creative writers from West Africa, especially those from Nigeria, with those from Eastern and Southern Africa. According to Jeyifo, the former tend to privilege divine explanations for the mundane experience of oppression whereas the latter tend to privilege historically materialist explanations. Hence the idea that Ifi Amadiume is a daughter of the goddess is more understandable within the highly metaphysical writings of Buchi Emecheta and Chinua Achebe than within the materialist offerings of Bessie Head and Ngugi Wa Thiongo. Readers of Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka would buy the idea more easily than readers of Dennis Brutus and Nurudin Farah. I will not go into the possible explanations for the diverse orientations of the literary traditions in Africa.

It is more important to point out that being a daughter of a goddess is not essentially an African belief system but one that is shared widely across cultures. Indians worship Shiva and ancient Egypt had many goddesses including the one that gave birth to the Sun God and the one that was the Ma’at, Goddess of Justice. Ma’at was probably the inspiration for the Greek Goddess of Justice, Persephone, just as the Virgin Mary, mother of the Son of God, was inspired by the virgin mother of the Egyptian Sun God. The Yoruba believe that they are the children of Oduduwa while Ghanaians venerate the fertility doll, Akua’ba. Today, across Europe, there are still hundreds of shrines dedicated to the worship of the black Madonna even by people who are strong adherents to white supremacy. The difference between the Igbo notion of Agbara nwanyi and all these devine goddesses is that the daughter of the goddess is not regarded as a divine being by the Igbo who use this simply as a simile. Hence, being a daughter of the goddess is similar to being a divine one or simply a Diva, a term that is reserved today for mostly black female superstars. That is why I have titled this review, Between Divas (divine ones) and Dimpers (daughters of imperialism).

The question, however, is whether the distinction between the goddess and imperialism is useful for understanding the exploitation and oppression of women in Africa today and the mobilization of resistance. As I am writing this review, news reached me about the sentencing of a pregnant 17 year old Nigerian girl to punishment of 180 lashes of the whip under the Sharia law imposed by a ‘democratically elected’ state government of Zamfara in Northern Nigeria. The girl’s crime was that the middle-aged friends of her father raped her and so she must be punished for having premarital sex. Other cultures would treat her rape as the crime and even if the rapists plead that she consented, they would be reminded that a child of that age has no consent and so this is nothing but child sexual abuse or at least statutory rape. There was no indication that the men who raped the child would be even reprimanded while the Islamic law is manipulated by those who wish to deepen the penetration of intrusive patriarchal traits into Africa for their own selfish reasons. This example has immense shock value but needs to be balanced by positive examples of those who may be legitimate - children of the goddess – but who are not directly identified as daughters of the goddess due to the middle class composition of those that belong to this category.

Amadiume (2000: 31-33) documents how domestic violence mirrors violence by the state especially in the many wars that use rape, torture, assassinations, landmines, and maiming as weapons against African women and children. My doubt remains whether the Zamfara child victim of rape who is about to be punished or should I say, victimized, by the law qualifies as a daughter of the goddess, since Muslims do not believe in goddesses, and since she is obviously not a daughter of imperialism. In chapter 6, Amadiume analyzed the impact and significance of class and gender for understanding child abuse. She illustrated this with the moving story of the 9 year old Nigerian ‘heroine’ who resisted child marriage by running away at the age of 12 from the cattle farmer to whom she was forcefully married. For her act of resistance, her ‘husband’ chopped off her fingers but she continued her resistance by escaping once more. However, in 1986, when her parents took her back to her rapist husband, the man chopped off her feet to prevent her from escaping again like the enslaved Africans who were recaptured in America. Does this make Hauwa Abubakar and girls like her daughters of the goddess?

It seems that the daughters of the goddess and the daughters of imperialism are both categories of elite women; middle-class university-trained activists or wives of army officers (or, as Amadiume put it, ‘we Europeanized African Women’, p.155). However, what Amadiume is demonstrating is that the universal sisterhood declared by western feminism is extremely naïve. Even among middle class women, she has demonstrated that a theorist would not find a monolithic group essentially united by their femininity. In other words, being middle class does not mean that you automatically share elite interests (even Marx and Lenin were petty bourgeois elements according to their training as lawyers and Walter Rodney was always reminding his colleagues in Tanzania that, as university professors, they were elements of the petty bourgeoisie). Hence, instead of laying emphasis on the Marxian analysis of class formation, Amadiume stressed class transformation or the ways that middle class female activists are transformed by their choice to either ally themselves with oppressed women or ally themselves with oppressor classes that are predominantly but not exclusively male.

This perspective is a welcome advancement on the very influential radical departure by the organization, Women In Nigeria (WIN). According to the WIN document of 1987, poor men and poor women are oppressed under the capitalist political economy of imperialism. However, according to WIN, all women suffer an additional oppression that men escape by reason of their complicity in the system of patriarchy. WIN concluded, contrary to western feminists who tend to be separatist, that men and women should be mobilized together to fight both forms of oppression. Amadiume is suggesting that not all women belong to the oppressed given that many of them are also oppressors in their own right. She uses the example of Family Support Programs through General Sani Abacha’s Community Banks that were led by selfish army officers’ wives (‘Mrs Establishment’) to press home the point that the rural market women see through the deceit and often prefer their own credit system, esusu, to such fraudulent schemes.

However, Amadiume adopted WIN strategy by advocating that both men and women should be educated about the health hazards of female genital mutilation so that they can make informed choices about their private lives instead of allowing the new colonialism to impose medical conditions on the lives of millions of poor people in Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia where different forms of circumcision are practiced. She warns that simply defending female genital mutilation as part of culture or condemning it as denying sexual pleasure to women would fail because women know that culture changes all the time (female circumcision is actually declining in popularity) and many circumcised women enjoy sex nevertheless while many uncircumcised western women fake orgasm regularly. This strategy of mobilizing both men and women through education could work better if both men and women are also educated that male circumcision is as unnecessary as female circumcision, a point that the author failed to make.

Finally, Amadiume moved beyond the nationalist conception of the problem of oppression and mobilization in the WIN document by highlighting the international mobilization that African women are organizing within fora like the Beijing Conference. She underscores the limitations of such global mobilization efforts especially if the question of imperialism remains unaddressed. Amadiume offered the alternative of listening to the perspectives of local activists such as Market Women’s Association members who may never have heard of Beijing but who can analyze the impacts of Structural Adjustment Programs and the Third World Debt Crisis on the poor most effectively. See for example, her detailed reasoning with the women of Nnobi (Inyom Nnobi) on their struggles for economic justice through control of the local market that gives them resources with which to voluntarily equip even the local hospital with beds (209-219).

WIN may not have articulated the need for international mobilization as clearly as they did the need for national mobilization, but the organization does participate in, and probably endorses international mobilization efforts, including Beijing. Besides, the local is also political, and as the name of WIN and its emphasis on imperialism as a cause of gender oppression suggests, women in Nigeria would have to ally themselves with women and men from other parts of Africa and the world in order to end sexism, ethnic chauvinism and class exploitation. What Amadiume’s text demonstrates indirectly is that the WIN document is somewhat dated, and so the organization should update the theoretical foundation of its practice.

I have no hesitation in recommending this book to all those who are interested in ending the systems of oppression and exploitation that still plague the people of Africa. The fact that the author completed her research without a penny in funding from any source is a credit to her and to her institution that probably gave her sabbaticals for that purpose but a ringing indictment against those who choose to marginalize African researchers and topics of interest to Africans when it comes to awarding prestige grants.

Copyright 2001 Africa Resource Center, Inc.

Citation Format

Agozino, Biko (2001). BETWEEN DIVAS AND DIMPERS: A REVIEW OF IFI AMADIUME’S DAUGHTERS OF THE GODDESS, DAUGHTERS OF IMPERIALISM: AFRICAN WOMEN, CULTURE, POWER & DEMOCRACY, London, Zed, 2000. Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: 1, 1.