Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies (2001)
ISSN: 1530-5686
TIES THAT (UN)BIND: FEMINISM, SISTERHOOD AND OTHER FOREIGN RELATIONS
|
Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies (2001) ISSN: 1530-5686 TIES THAT (UN)BIND: FEMINISM, SISTERHOOD AND OTHER FOREIGN RELATIONS |
|
Oyeronke Oyewumi
Sisterhood has emerged as the dominant model for feminist intercommunity relations. A term of political solidarity, “sisterhood” speaks women’s activism. The meaning it carries for its originators and deployers is one of shared oppression, common victimization, community of interests, solidarity, and collective activism. Whether it refers to interracial, international, transglobal, or cross- cultural relations, the ideal promoted is couched in the rhetoric of kinship and family bonds. Nevertheless, many feminists have criticized this use of the term. African American feminists have, for example, pointed out what they consider the hypocrisy and the dishonesty of white feminists in advocating an unconditional love and solidarity amongst all women, even as they exercised their race and class privileges on the backs of non-white women. Given this insightful critique of sisterhood as a model for inter-racial relations, one is surprised that the term still has currency in certain feminist circles. Unlike the word “feminism,” which has engendered new concepts like womanism and Third World feminism, for example, “sisterhood” has not generated alternative terms of political solidarity. Rather, African American feminists, in particular, have pointed out the limitations of the term “sisterhood,” attempting to reformulate it to carry the weight of experiences beyond those of white women. Audre Lorde (1984) writes about the “sister outsider,” an oxymoron which suggests that the problem is not really the notion of sisterhood but the way it has been used in the women’s movement. Another black feminist, bell hooks (1995), writes about “false sisterhood,” indicating that the term’s early meanings were not realized in the lives of contemporary feminists. She writes:
Sisterhood became yet another shield against reality, another support system. Their [white feminists’] version of Sisterhood was informed by racist and classist assumptions about white womanhood, that the white “lady” (that is to say the bourgeois woman) should be protected from all that might upset or discomfort her and shielded from negative realities that might lead to confrontation. (296)
Sisterhood amongst women of a racially and culturally diverse group, hooks concluded, is possible, but only with a great deal of continuous work against all sorts of divisions, most importantly, racism. Thus, for hooks, the problem with the concept of sisterhood is that it takes political solidarity for granted rather than as a goal to be worked at and achieved.
A recurrent criticism of white feminism from its inception, as manifested also in the hooks quote above, is that white women feminists have considered their experience of womanhood in their culture as the prototypic female experience and have used it to define feminism. My contention is that the articulation of sisterhood as a framework for cross-boundary feminist relations is very much tied to the use of white women’s experiences as the basis for feminism. If white solipsism is taken seriously, then the concept of sisterhood itself, given that it originated with white women, needs to be interrogated.
At issue here are the politics of culture, the cultural meaning of sisterhood, and whether such a concept can be viable given diverse cultural experiences. We must question the very foundation of sisterhood, both as a concept and as a desirable relationship. Undoubtedly a cultural understanding is expressed in the choice of “sisterhood” over other terms to describe relations between white and black women, rhetorically speaking. Race was the first border it had to cross before sisterhood went global. One must ask: What is it and how did it become a category or concept of choice through which interracial, cross-cultural, and transnational relations are to be negotiated? Is the term multicultural? The reason for the selection of sisterhood over other terms of solidarity– such as friend, comrade, or compatriot–is not obvious. Even if we grant that sisterhood has a head start over comrade and friend in that it is a kinship term, suggesting family ties, unconditional love and loyalty, but what about a term deriving from motherhood or its variant. Western readers will be quick to respond that motherhood introduces a generational gap, which signals inequality, the very thing that feminism was founded to destroy. This reaction, of course, is very much tied to the social context of motherhood in contemporary Western cultures, where it is a solitary experience, a social role that is perceived to be occupied by one person at a time within the nuclear family. To an African reader (or even a Chicana), the model of motherhood is absolutely natural, because if anything binds women together in collective experience, it is the mothering of children, each other, and consequently the community. Because of the tradition of multiple mothering, African “sisterly” relations are more likely to be found in co-mothering. Mothers were present in all generations within and without the household and the family, and motherhood was also the great leveler for women.
Beyond the dichotomous cultural geography implicit in a comparison of African and Western cultures, however, the tradition of multiple and nonexclusive mothering is also present within African American and Chicano cultures in the United States and in a number of Afro-Caribbean societies. Patricia Hill Collins (1990) writes about the tradition of Other Mothers amongst African Americans. Sociologist Denise Segura points out that the term comadre–co-mother–is an expression of sisterhood amongst Chicanas.1 In a paper on Chicana/o family structure, Segura and Pierce (1993) draw attention to multiple mothering figures as a feature of family life as mother and aunts “work together both to make meals and to nurture the family and each other” (62). In a number of the Caribbean Islands, including Trinidad, St. Lucia, and Haiti, the term macoumere is used to express friendship amongst women.2 This term essentially encapsulates a particular kind of relationship amongst women that is founded on trust and an expectation of mutual support– material and otherwise– particularly with regard to the raising of children, which is the most important and lifelong charge of women. In St. Lucia, a close friend is a macoum.3
Against this background, we must ask again: Why was “sisterhood” chosen as the basis of feminist alliances? Why not “co-motherhood”? The point is that there is nothing inherent in the concept of sisterhood to describe interracial, cross-cultural, or any social relationships. The privileging of the ideology of sisterhood over an ideology of shared nurturing embodied in the institution of motherhood, for example, must be sought within the specific culture and history of Euro- Americans. My goal in this essay is to examine the cultural basis of sisterhood as a kinship term, a metaphor of kin, an ideology of solidarity, and a political model used as a bridge across communities. Simply put, since sisterhood is a kinship term that emerges from the logic of the nuclear family, which is a specific Euro-American family form, one must ask why we should adopt this term for Africans and other groups whose family systems have a different logic and hence articulate and privilege a different set of kinship and non-kin relations.
“Sisterhood,” just like the term “feminism,” demands theorization because, although its origins are very much tied to a specific culture, its intended application is ultimately transglobal. What meaning does it carry as it crosses boundaries, if indeed it ever does cross boundaries? Should it carry the same meaning? Can it carry the same meaning, given that words are informed by specific cultural assumptions and histories? What exactly are the implications of the cross- cultural use of “sisterhood,” given that the meaning shifts depending on a host of factors. Mutual unintelligibility is a real possibility–and a hazardous one, given the feminist wish for women to work together to change the world. It is also pertinent to question whether the desired relationship apparent in the use of “sisterhood” by white women is matched by the desire of other women to relate to them and others in that way.
The privilege of naming the model for a cross-border would-be relationship among women regardless of race, color, culture, and geography fell to white, American, middle- class women. Their very first invitation was extended to African American women. What kind of sorority were black women being invited to join? What was it in the family experience of white American women that privileged sisterhood over other terms of political solidarity? Feminist philosopher Maria Lugones (1995) questions why white American feminists would go inside the patriarchal nuclear family institution to select a model for female solidarity. Lugones considers this odd behaviour and questions whether anything can really be salvaged from this oppressive institution. Lugones goes on to suggest that perhaps the model of sisterhood that white American feminists were proposing did not derive from their family situation but instead from elsewhere (136).
In contrast, I would argue that there is nothing odd in the white feminist usage of sisterhood as a model for female solidarity. In fact, the only place where the model of sisterhood makes sense is within the social organization of the white American nuclear family and the ideologies that flowed from it. Gender distinctions are fundamental to the institutions of Western culture on which the white American family is based, and the family as an institution is at the cutting edge of gender manufacturing and assigning. With the invention in the United States of a distinct form of the nuclear family in the nineteenth century, gender became even more important as the line of fracture in the family, given that the family became smaller and more isolated and that the generational difference that was the hallmark of the European-type stem family did not transfer to the U.S. Thus, gender was the fundamental organizing principle of the nuclear family, and gender distinctions were the primary source of hierarchy and oppression within it. By the same token, gender sameness was the primary source of identification and solidarity in this family type. Thus, daughters identified as females with their mother and sisters (Chodorow 1978).
In fact, the mother-daughter relationship is a key to understanding the motivations of white women in the early part of second-wave feminism. These feminists viewed the nuclear family in its most patriarchal dimension, focusing on the way in which it had juvenilized their mothers and stripped them of any autonomy. Writing about mother- daughter relationships and their effect on feminist activism for white women, Jill Lewis (Joseph and Lewis 1986) noted the sources of feminist negative attitudes towards motherhood:
The fear of becoming our mothers, our refusal to emulate them, . is a fear of the specific conditions of motherhood and womanhood, which necessitate our oppression. It is a rejection of the nonviable patriarchal separation of nurturance and autonomy, caring and achievement, loving and power. The fear stems from our knowledge that, through our relationship with our mothers, we are cyclically part of those conditions, . (139-140)
In this sort of nuclear family, the gender identification of children with their mothers underscores the fact that the mother is first and foremost (even to children) the patriarch’s wife. The gender-based division of power in the nuclear family permanently cast the mother in the powerless role of a victim. It is not surprising then that motherhood never ranked high in the kin relationship or roles to which middle-class white American feminists aspired. They could, on the other hand, identify with their sisters, who not only grew up under the terrifying shadow of the patriarchal father but also shared the same difficult gender-identification with the powerless mother and the need to distance themselves from her. Sisterly relations emerged out of their family heritage as the only viable model: the mother-daughter relationship was hierarchical, but sisters were equal. Sisterhood, which developed to signal the gender exclusivity necessary for white women to escape male control, also symbolized common victimhood and shared oppression, which made for equal relations and solidarity. It follows then that sisterhood has historical and cultural roots in the white American nineteenth- and twentieth-century family experience.
Any engagement with feminist, interracial, cross-cultural relationships must start with U. S. black-white relations–the testing ground of difference that constituted a dress rehearsal for the global sisterhood. As I mentioned earlier, some of the most astute interpreters of the African American feminist experience do not jettison sisterhood, they only seek to make it more honest by reformulating it. The refusal to subvert the concept of sisterhood may be due to the fact that African American feminists recognize themselves in its usage. The kin terms “sister” and “brother” are central to the black experience in the United States. An enduring legacy of plantation slavery, these are political terms that immediately establish solidarity and a sense of connection and community among black people. Pat Alake Rozelle (1995) points out: “The slave experience is the beginning of ‘sister’ and ‘brother.’ When a people are bastardized, raped, and fragmented from their families, they have to create family. Then it is a political act to call those who are not your blood, but who are your people ‘brother’ and ‘sister’” (139). Rozelle suggests that white feminism appropriated the term “sisterhood” from the black experience following the participation of many white women in the Civil Rights movement. It is well documented that the second-wave feminist movement derived from and developed within the black Civil Rights movement. Rozelle argues that white women who had participated in the Civil Rights movement, having had such a positive encounter in this community of resistance, naturally tried to borrow the language of the black experience of which “sister” was a part. She points out that because of their racism, however, they were unable to replicate the meaning and function which the term had in the black community (141).
A close examination of the ways in which these kinship models are used in the black community and among white feminists reveal a gulf in what they symbolize and the meaning attached to them to suggest that interpretation must proceed from differing cultures and historical experiences. The use of kinship terms in African American communities differs markedly from their use by white feminists. For one thing, African Americans make use of both kinship terms “brother” and “sister”–always the pair. On the other hand, “sisterhood,” a collective noun, is the predominant term used to express kinship in white feminism. Sisterhood is a metaphor, denoting a collectivity, and it operates at a more abstract and generalized level than the terms “sister” and “brother” amongst black Americans, which are most often used on a personalized, one-to-one basis.
More fundamentally, “sisterhood” or gender-specific kinship terms in feminism are deployed to signal an exclusive female community. For African Americans, despite the fact that these terms are gendered, both “brother” and “sister” transcend gender solidarity and are used to signal racial communion. In the black community, “sister” does not imply a desire for a female exclusive community (of interests), which is precisely what is at its base in white feminism. It is not surprising, then, that use of the collective noun “sisterhood” is rare in the African American experience. Even when “sisters” in contrast to “brother” are singled out in the black community for recognition, it is an acknowledgment of the gender-specific burden that black women have borne historically, way beyond the other forms of oppression that they share with black men.4 Community building was central to resisting white supremacy and to the politics of survival of the African American community in slavery and beyond.
The notion of gender inclusiveness that is present in African American usage of “sister” and “brother”–terms which superficially suggest gender-specific bonds and interests if not linguistic exclusiveness–demands further theorizing. Although the African American usage of brother/sister appears to be linguistically almost identical to their use by feminists, the meaning and function of these kinship terms seem to derive more from African family organization and notions about kin relations. For one thing, in African social organization, household and family are not identical or co-terminous; therefore there are always close family members who live elsewhere. Without denying the importance of slavery in the African American experience, it would appear that the gender- inclusive use of the pair brother/sister also derived from West African cultures from which many black Americans originated. I make this statement against the background of the fact that many African languages do not have gender-specific kinship categories like sister and brother. The language that most of the enslaved Africans brought to the Americas did not contain linguistic equivalents of the kin terms “brother” and “sister” because many African languages do not express gender- specificity in sibling relations. Though one may not be able to locate the exact moment at which the enslaved Africans started to address each other in these terms in the Americas, it is clear that such usage evolved with the experience of slavery and acculturation. The consciousness of racial affinity as the basis of solidarity must have developed as soon as enslaved Africans were all put in the same boat and in company of the white slavers. At that moment, race became the signifier of kinship. The consciousness of gender distinctions in social experience must have been reinforced also by the slavers’ practice of putting male and female slaves in different parts of the ship. Language subsequently emerged to acknowledge the gender-specificity of the experience of slavery but never the gender-exclusive interest of one gender, separate from those of the enslaved community.
Nevertheless, it is significant that for many of the enslaved Africans, gender was not coded linguistically in their original languages. Indeed, in that the kinship categories “brother” and “sister” did not exist in the lexicon of many of the West African communities from which they originated. In a book documenting the African heritage of the Georgia islands, we catch a glimpse of how a black American grandson of an enslaved African woman navigates the English language without much attention to the gender-specific nature of pronouns. In an interview with researchers, Ben Sullivan, one of the oldest men living on the island in the 1940s, had this to say about his African roots: “Muh granmothuh Hettie, duh mothuh uh muh Bella, he come from Africa too an he huzbun come frum Africa” [my emphasis] (Savannah Unit Georgia Writers’ Project: 181). His speech, reminiscent of a number of West African pidgins deriving from African languages, uses the English masculine pronoun to refer to both genders as if it were equivalent to the non-gendered subject pronouns of many African languages. It also brings to mind the case of Mary Kingsley, the nineteenth-century English explorer who was repeatedly referred to as “sir” by West Africans as she travelled through the region. This reference to Kingsley was an indication not that she had been turned into an honorary male, but of the gender-free nature of many African languages, and indeed a lack of gendered notions of power and hierarchy in African cultures generally. The way in which the concepts of brother and sister emerged in the African American experience recalls an African understanding, whereas the gender predilection in the English language itself imposed a restriction. In any discussion of sisterhood for Africans, the question of language is even more central than usual.
With regard to Africa, the most important question under consideration turns on the issue of cultural imperialism. On what basis are feminist concepts, developed from Western social categories, transferable or exportable to other cultures that display a different social organization and cultural logic, and what are the implications? A careful history and deconstruction of the concept of sisterhood grounds it in the patriarchal Euro- American nuclear family, with all its well-documented negative effects on females. What relevance or interest does such a deeply gendered social organization, whose social categories and cultural logics are different, hold for Africa? For one thing, the nuclear family is virtually absent on the African continent.5 The comparable category in many West African cultures to that of “sister” in Western culture–sister as sibling who has a common interest because of shared experience and social location and whose love and loyalty are supposed to be unconditional–is a category that literally translates into “my mother’s child.” In Yoruba it is omo-iya. The following is a sample of the term in a number of West African languages: Nwanne (Igbo), Omwiyemwen (Benin), Doo mi ndey (Wolof), . ba den (Bamana), Gna’izo (Songhoi-Hombori), Eyen-eka (Efik), Badenya (Manding), Biddo yaya’m (Fulani). The concept omo-iya and sister give us clues as to which categories are considered primary in the different cultural contexts in which they developed. I have elucidated the Western cultural context of “sister” as one in which gender is a fundamental and therefore a primary category. Hence, it was imperative for family members to be categorized as male or female, boy or girl, because this was necessary for determining their place and function within the family. Because of the matrifocality of many African family systems, the mother is the pivot around which familial relationships are delineated and organized. The category of omo-iya transcends gender; sometimes it is used to refer to an individual, but what it encapsulates is the collectivity. It functions to locate the individual within a socially recognized grouping and underscores the significance of mother-child ties in delineating and anchoring a child’s place in the family. These are relationships that are primary and privileged, and they should be protected above others. Omo-iya is the primary category in the sense that it is the first and fundamental source of identification for the child in the household. To put it crudely, in the traditional Yoruba household, the first thing you need to know is not whether you are a boy or a girl but who are your omo-iya–siblings with whom you share the same mother. Symbolically, omo-iya emblematizes unconditional love, togetherness, unity, solidarity, and loyalty. Within the household and family, treatment of any one individual and behaviour towards that person is always filtered through the knowledge of who is the person’s mother and omo-iya. Because of the social importance of the omo-iya category, an only child is disadvantaged within the household, not simply due to being outnumbered by some other group but because there is a social role elaborated for siblings. There are certain things that cannot be done, experienced, or enjoyed throughout the life course except by omo- iya, both for one another and as a group. Furthermore, the omo-iya category extends beyond the patrilineage (household) in that the category includes cousins related to one on the mother’s side. Matrilateral cousins are also omo-iya and are regarded as close as siblings, closer than half-brothers and half-sisters with whom one shares the same father and who often live in the same residence. Thus, the most important shared experience that omo-iya recalls and builds on is the fact that the group of siblings shared the womb of the mother. They are what have been called uterine siblings. The experience of the mother’s womb is not gendered–it carries both male and female babies; therefore the social grouping of omo-iya does not anticipate any gender commonality amongst its members, and the elaboration of their emotional closeness does not rest on it. Sisterhood, in contrast, is defined solely by gender commonality and the anticipated similarity in social experience as a result of having what Western culture designates as the inferior body-type–the female one.
What emerges from the African household and family organizations is the importance of motherhood, of mother-derived ties as the most significant, and of mothers as powerful. Because fundamentally motherhood is not constructed in tandem with fatherhood, the idea that mothers are powerful–literally and metaphysically, particularly the regard to the well being of the child–is very much a defining characteristic of the institution. Mothers are the pivot around which family is structured and family life rotates.
In this family system, unlike in the nuclear family, motherhood is the most important source and model of solidarity, and being a mother is perceived as an attractive and desirable goal to achieve. The privileging of motherhood in the African family organization contrasts with the ambivalence about motherhood in feminism, and the deliberate elevation there of sisterhood as the only positive female relationship model. As I pointed out in my earlier discussion, the very definition of sisterhood rests on an assumption of gender as an essential category in society and the need for female solidarity in the face of this body-based oppression. Given these fundamental differences between the social organization of family and kinship in Africa, in contrast to kinship in the Euro-American nuclear family, why then should Africans adopt sisterhood as a model for solidarity, or for anything else for that matter? Significantly, what cultural norms are being injected into African forms, for what purpose and to what effect, are critical prior questions.
In many African societies, there is no sisterhood without motherhood. The most profound sisterly relations are to be found in co-mothering, which is the essence of community building. Co-mothering as a communal ideal and social practice is not reducible to biological motherhood; it transcends it. The fact that the children of one’s omo-iya are regarded as one’s children demonstrates this ideal. Furthermore, in many polygynous, multiple-generational households, the reality is that children experience many mothers. Notwithstanding the voluminous “co- wife” literature that Western anthropologists have used to define African polygamy, “co-mother” is the preferred idiom in many African cultures for expressing the relationship amongst women married into the same family. In Yoruba culture, for example, all women who have married into the family–even when they are married to different brothers–relate to each other as if they have one and the same husband, since marriage is a collective act contracted not between two individuals but two clans. A younger wife refers to an older one as Iya ile, mother of the house.
6Before any discussion of African models of solidarity, the question of how African female associations have been interpreted by some black feminists in the West requires some attention. A number of black feminists in the United States have misrepresented a range of institutions and social practices in West African societies as evidence of culturally sanctioned and institutionalized forms of lesbianism. That I am compelled to address this question is an indication of the extent to which Africa remains for many in the Euro-American world a tabula rasa upon which anything can be written. That African articulations do not count–even amongst some black feminists, whose politics is centered on their consanguinal ties to Africa–speaks volumes about the complexity of cultural imperialism and its various practitioners.
It is perhaps not surprising that the search for Africa continues to structure questions of black identity in the US. This quest for Africa, often articulated as a theme of “paradise lost,” is an idea whose resonance partially rests on the infinite plasticity and malleability of Africa in the black American imagination. “What is Africa to me?” the poet Countee Cullen asks. For some African Americans, Africa really has no reality or meaning independent of what it means to them individually and as members of particular sub-groupings. All too often, the only way that Africa participates in this discourse about black identity is in its remaking in the image of whichever political grouping it is called upon to serve within this Diaspora community.
Lately, black feminists have arisen as one constituency that Africa must serve both positively and negatively. Their discourse about black feminist identity oscillates between what I would characterize as notions of “paradise recognized” and “paradise demonized”–concepts which are not mutually exclusive. A clear example of the latter is detailed in my paper “Alice in Motherland: Reading Alice Walker on Africa and screening the Colour Black” in which I interrogate Alice Walker’s representation of Africa as the ultimate fountainhead of misogyny.
What I am concerned about here, however, is the representation of Africa by black lesbian feminists as a paradise in which lesbianism is not only accepted, but is institutionalized in women’s everyday relationships. Audre Lorde (1983) to my knowledge was the first to claim that the “woman-to-woman marriages” found in a number of African societies are actually lesbian unions, a claim which she then uses to underwrite her own identity as a black lesbian. Lorde makes cryptic allusions to the ahonsi (popularly represented in the Western imagination as Amazons), a military regiment of female soldiers in the Dahomean7 army in the nineteenth century, as an example of traditional African lesbian sisterhood.8 With all due respect to Lorde’s pioneering and insightful writings on feminism, race, and difference, her representation of these African institutions is utterly without foundation. It should be made clear that the issue here is not whether homosexuality exists in Africa or not. For me, that debate (if ever there was one) is moot since homosexuality is part of the human condition. The important issue at hand is not homosexuality but the culture of misrepresentation that pervades the depiction of African peoples, institutions and forms especially by people living in the Northern hemisphere. This culture of misrepresentation inevitably lead to discounting and disregarding Africans even in the articulation of their own realities.
Both the organization of “woman marriage” and the “ahonsi” who are “wives of the king” in Dahomean society, demonstrate very clearly the broad and complex meaning of marriage as a social (not necessarily sexual) institution in African societies. The role of “wife” encapsulates the relationship of women who enter a particular lineage through marriage, in contrast to their husbands–defined as men, women, and children (both boys and girls)–who are members of the lineage by birth. The definition of marriage does not depend on there being a sexual relationship between two people. Rather, it is often a social, non-sexual relationship, indicating the place of an individual in the family. Thus, a woman marries a woman in order for the “female husband” to be able to have children that she can claim legally as heirs. The “female wife” is a wife to the female husband in that she (the husband) has jural rights to her and the children produced within the marriage despite the fact that they do not engage in sexual intercourse. A male recruited by the husband (female) impegnates the wife. Similarly, the ahonsi are called wives of the king of Dahomey despite the fact that the king does not necessarily engage in sexual relationships with them. In a host of African societies, marriage is predicated on a contractual agreement, cemented by the giving of bridewealth by the family of the husband to the family of the wife. What these two examples speak to is not same- sex marriage, but that the category of “wife” in patrilineal African societies is a catch-all for relationships between those who are blood relations (male and female) on the one hand, and those women who come into the family through marriage on the other. Wives are women who are recruited into the family through affinal and other non- blood relationships. Consequently, in many West African societies, including Yoruba and Igbo, women married into the family are not just the wives of males, they are also wives of females. The point is that “woman-to-woman” marriage is not the only instance of a socially recognized marriage form that does not involve sexual relations. Thus, in a West African context where these practices still obtain, there is no indication that they are associated with homosexuality in theory or in fact.
What is also remarkable is that many of the African social practices that are at issue here are not outmoded, but are living traditions that have been well documented by Africans; therefore, we cannot take refuge in the assumption that their meanings are lost in time. Consider the following example, articulated by Nigerian, Harvard- educated anthropologist Felicia Ekejiuba (1995) about her family’s experience of woman marriage in Igboland in the contemporary period: “My maternal aunt, for instance, emerged from a ‘failed,’ childless marriage to re- establish her ‘hearth-hold.’ ... She later became a ‘female husband’ . by ‘marrying’ her own wife who increased the ‘hearthold’ by producing four more children for her” (48). Unfortunately, the issue is not the reality of African social institutions and cultural practices but the various agendas of “blackness,” and “womanism” that Africa is called upon to serve in the United States and other parts of the African Diaspora. Such concerns cannot define African institutions; they must be articulated on their own terms.
Beyond Lorde’s original use of Africa to account for her own homosexuality, in a more recent paper on Afro-Surinamese working class women, anthropologist Gloria Wekker (1997) discusses the institution of “mati work”–a social practice which she claims involves lesbian relationships. Wekker speculates that mati work is an elaboration of Surinamese West African heritage and that “although the origin of the mati work is often associated with the departure of men to do migrant labor . from my perspective, there is no good reason to suppose that mati work was not already present in West Africa .” (338). Wekker, like Lorde before her, does not provide any evidence for this assertion other than the work of two founding fathers of anthropology in Africa, Melville Herskovitts and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who worked in the forties and sixties, when the discipline of anthropology, as handmaiden of European colonization of Africa, was focused on exoticizing Africa as part of a larger project of justifying foreign dominance. Wekker ignores the contemporary scholarship of African anthropologists like Ifi Amadiume, who has written on woman-to-woman marriage and other family forms in Igbo society of southeastern Nigeria. Amadiume’s research shows very clearly that woman- to- woman marriage is not about same-sex sexual relations, but is based on social relations of family formation and maintenance (Amadiume 1981). The issue is no longer whether there is African documentation of African institutions; instead, it is a question of whose claims are preferred—those of Western male anthropologists over African female anthropologists many of who have personal knowledge of these institutions. fits in with The cryptic phrase “there is no reason to suppose,” which is present in Wekker’s account quoted above, is vintage Evans-Pritchard (1971), who, in his paper on what he claims to be Azande homosexuality, writes that “there is no reason to suppose it was introduced by the Arabs” (1429).
Organizing–associating to attain a purpose–is the process by which traditional Africans wove the very fabric of their societies. Because of the strong sense of community and the fact that individual experience could only be realized in a group, formal organizations became a way of life. Besides kinship organizations, age grades, occupational guilds, and religious, social, and political organizations are all features of African community life. In Yorubaland as one case study, associations were called egbe, which also means peer group. Members of a convivial egbe referred to each other as oore–friend. In fact, in Yoruba society, no one, male or female, can go through life without oore. During celebrations, especially those associated with rites of passage or other major life events, one relies on one’s oore for support. Sociologist N. A. Fadipe, elaborating the function of one’s egbe, wrote:
In case of death in the family of any member, he or she was helped by the rest of the Egbe. They helped her perform tasks that needed to be done as well as to make the occasion grand with dancing, singing and feasting.... During the period of courtship, a young man had the support and cooperation of members of his Egbe in whatever labour services were required by custom to be rendered to the parents-in-law. (258)
In the case of a female, upon marriage, it is members of her egbe, childhood friends who join her in chanting the ekun iyawo (bridal chants) (when it was still customary to do so) and who accompany her to the house of the groom. Subsequently, new friends are also made, and much of female friendship centers around experiences of shared mothering and continuous mutual support from friends who are at a similar stage in the life cycle. Friendship based on socially defined mutual interest is the model for non-kin relations. Although mature friendship often is expressed in the idiom of kinship relations, the important point is that it is never the starting point. African American anthropologist Niara Sudarkasa’s (1996) experience in Aawe, a Yoruba town in which she conducted research in the early 1960s, is telling:
To most people in Awe [Aawe] I was known only in the role of researcher.. A relatively small group of women, ranging in age from about twenty five to forty, became my friends. We used the term “Ore” [oore] (literally, “friend”) as one would use a personal name. This was the group of women with whom I often exchanged visits and presents, for whom I did special favors . with whom I gossiped, to whom I went for advice..(205-206)
Maria Lugones (1995), in her discussion of why friendship and not sisterhood should be the model for feminist intergroup relations, writes: “Unlike ‘sisters,’ which presupposes the institution of the family and takes as model a particular relation. friendship is not an institutional relationship.. There are no rules specifying the duties and rights of friends” (141-142). Such a statement cannot bear scrutiny even in American society especially post Lewinsky/Linda Tripp saga! Lugones’ observation does not hold for many African societies. To continue with our case study, in Yoruba society, friendship is institutionalized and has specific rights and obligations. For elucidation, let us revisit Sudarkasa’s experience in Aawe as an indication of prevailing expectations held about friendship. She writes that it was to her group of oore to
whom I reported most of my movements, and whenever I was away from the town, it was from them that people made inquiries about my whereabouts. Ore [Oore] were the only ones in town who regularly called me aside to give me advice on personal matters.. If I wanted straightforward information on anything going on in the town, I went to ... my special friend. Whenever anything happened about which they thought I had not heard, they would send someone to inform me. (206)
Another example of institutionalized friendship in an African setting is the Chinjira, a non-kin relationship between women in Southern Malawi. It is a special friendship that involves social, ritual, and economic obligations, and this relationship is especially called forth at times of crisis in a woman’s life. At such times, the anjira (friend) is obligated to provide emotional, material, and ritual support–whatever the occasion demands.9
Even more important than friendship groups and convivial everyday clubs are associations formed to attain a specific purpose. Traditionally, these would include trading guilds, which established prices of goods and commodity standards. During the colonial period, a number of anti-colonial movements constituted by women emerged in Southern Nigeria. The three most prominent took place in Aba, Lagos, and Abeokuta; in these three cities, women organized to fight many oppressive colonial policies focusing on unjust taxation, price controls, and the colonial imposition of dictatorial male chiefs. Although these organizations have been labeled women’s organizations, it is clear that they were constituted by women but not by women qua women. In Lagos and Abeokuta, the basis of these groups did not stem from some notion of womanhood or gender consciousness but rather from the fact that these Yoruba women were traders: occupational commonality, not gender, was the primary basis of solidarity.
Even in the case of the Women’s War of the southeast, which stemmed from the Igbo and Ibibio traditional dual-sex political system, it was not the inherent consciousness of gender as identity that informed the forming of organizations but rather the fact of the social positioning of women as wives who are strangers in a particular village. According to Kamene Okonjo (1976), because Igbo marriage was “exogamous and patrilocal” (51), almost all adult women in a village would be wives and therefore the inyemedi is actually an organization of wives, not of women in general. As a corollary, the umuada (daughters of the lineage) had a separate organization, and their status was superior to that of the wives. It is important to emphasize that each adult woman played roles of both wife and daughter, albeit in different villages. None of these political organizations could be represented as a sisterhood in the contemporary feminist sense of a solidarity organization based on gender. In fact, in many African societies, any notions of a universal female sisterhood will immediately run up against the differing and often opposed interests of women as daughters and women as wives in the lineage and in the society at large. Gender is not viewed as a source of political identity, and where it may appear to play a role, such politics are related to social location, recognizing that identities are situational and that they emanate from multiple social positionings.
In African societies, the question of organizing to attain a political goal speaks to the issue of forming political alliances, and not sisterhood, since group identity is constituted socially and is not based on any qualities of shared anatomy popularly called gender. Consequently, it would be impractical and counterproductive to approach community building and the struggle for a just society as projects constituted on the basis of an exclusive sisterhood of the body. Coalition politics seems to be the practical, age-old system of furthering group interest only, of course, if a group has identified a common interest. Women do not constitute such a group unambiguously or continuously. In the oft-repeated, eloquent words of Bernice Reagon (1983), a coalition is not home (359). So if a coalition is not home, why are we looking for sisters within it? As we approach the turning of the millenium, this misadventure must stop.
Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London: Zed Press, 1987.
Appiah, Anthony. In My Father’s House. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990.
Ekejiuba, Felicia I. “Down to Fundamentals: Women-centered Hearth-holds in Rural West Africa.” Women Wielding the Hoe. Ed. Deborah Fahy- Bryceson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. “Sexual Inversion among the Azande.” American Anthropologist 72 (1970): 1428-1433.
Fadipe, N. A. The Sociology of the Yoruba. Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1970.
Herskovits, Melville J. “A Note On ‘Woman Marriage’ in Dahomey.” Africa 10 (1937): 335-41.
hooks, bell. “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women.” Feminism and Community. Ed. Penny A.Weiss and Marilyn Friedman. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.
Joseph, Gloria I. and Jill Lewis. Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1986.
Lorde, Audre. Sister outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: Crossing Press, 1984.
----------------. Zami, a new spelling of my name. New York: Crossing Press, 1983.
Lugones, Maria C. “Sisterhood and Friendship as Feminist Models.” Feminism and Community. Ed. Penny A.Weiss and Marilyn Friedman. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.
Nzegwu, Nkiru. “Questions of Identity and Inheritance: A Critical Review of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House.” Hypatia 11.1 (1996): 175-202.
Okonjo, Kamene. “The Dual-Sex Political System in Operation: Igbo Women and Community Politics in Midwestern Nigeria.” Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change. Ed. Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976.
Oyewumi, Oyeronke. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
-------------------. “Alice in Motherland: Reading Alice Walker on Africa and Screening the Colour Black,” in African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood. Ed. Oyeronke Oyewumi. Africa World Press (forthcoming).
Reagon, Bernice Johnson. “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century.” Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. 1st ed. Ed. Barbara Smith. New York: Kitchen Table– Women of Colour Press, 1983.
Rosezelle, Pat Alake. “Sisterhood and Friendship as Feminist Models.” Feminism and Community. Ed. Penny A.Weiss and Marilyn Friedman. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.
Savannah Unit Georgia Writers’ Project. Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1940.
Segura, Denise A. and Jennifer L. Pierce. “Chicana/o Family Structure and Gender Personality: Chodorow, Familism, and Psychoanalytic Sociology Revisited.” Signs 19.1 (Autumn 1993): 62-91.
Sudarkasa, Niara. “Female Employment and Family Organization in West Africa.” The Black Women Cross-Culturally. Ed. Filomina Chioma Steady. Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing Company, Inc., 1981.
Wekker, Gloria. “One Finger Does Not Drink Okra Soup: Afro- Surinamese Women and Critical Analysis.” Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. Ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Copyright 2001 Africa Resource Center, Inc.
Citation Format
Oyewumi, Oyeronke (2001). TIES THAT (UN)BIND: FEMINISM, SISTERHOOD AND OTHER FOREIGN RELATIONS. Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: 1, 1.