Perhaps the key word in Karenga’s early analysis of utopian gender relations is complementarity. In this theory, women should complement male roles and, therefore, share the responsibilities of nation building. Of course, in this formulation, complementary did not mean equal. Instead, men and women were to have separate tasks and unequal power. Indeed, in much of Africa today, women give more to men than they get in return in their complementary labor exchange. This is not to suggest that African women are only victims in their societies; nonetheless, sexism based on a complementary model severely limits the possibilities of many women’s lives.
It is important to note that Karenga has reformed his position on women. Apparently, he used the time he spent in jail during the 1970s effectively by spending much of his time studying. It is from his jail cell that he published influential pieces in Black Scholar and the Journal of Black Studies. He began to articulate more clearly a critique of hegemonic culture, showing the impact of reading Lukacs, Gramsci, Cabral, and Touré. And though he does not say so explicitly, he begins to respond to black feminist critics of his work. Indeed, I find the change in his position on women impressive. Although he remains mired in heterosexist assumptions and never acknowledges his change of heart, he drops his explicit arguments supporting the subordination of women. The new Ron Karenga argues for equality in the heterosexual pair despite his continued hostility to feminists.34
Unfortunately, too few nationalists have made this transition with him. Male roles remain defined by conventional, antifeminist notions that fail to address the realities of black life. For example, articles in Nathan and Julia Hare’s journal, Black Male/Female Relationships, consistently articulate such roles. Charlyn A. Harper-Bolton begins her contribution, “A Reconceptualization of the African American Woman” by examining “traditional African philosophy, the nature of the traditional African woman, and the African American slave woman.”35 She uses African tradition as her starting point because she assumes an essential connection between the African past and African American present:The contemporary African American woman carries within her very essence, within her very soul, the legacy that was bequeathed to her by the traditional African woman and the African American slave woman.36
She leaves unproblematic the African legacy to African Americans as she presents an ahistorical model of African belief systems that ignores the conflict and struggle over meaning so basic to the making of history. This model assumes a harmonious spirituality versus conflicting materialism dichotomy that grounds the work of Asante and her major sources, John Mbiti and Wade Nobles.37
It is a peculiarly Eurocentric approach that accepts conflict and competing interests in a Western context but not in an African one. Harper-Bolton never moves beyond the mistaken notion that Africans lived simply and harmoniously until the evil Europeans upset their happy life. Ironically, as I have been arguing, such an image of Africans living in static isolation from historical dynamics supports racist ideals and practices and conveniently overlooks the power dynamics that existed in precolonial Africa like anywhere else in the world. In addition, her model portrays African women as a monolithic and undifferentiated category with no competing interests, values, and conflicts. The power of older women over younger women that characterizes so many African cultures becomes idealized as a vision of the elders’ wisdom in decision making. It accepts the view of age relations presented by more powerful older women whose hidden agenda often is to socialize girls into docile daughters and daughters-in-law.
When Harper-Bolton turns to the legacy of slave women for contemporary life she owes a large, but unacknowledged, debt to the social science literature on African survivals in African American culture. In particular, her work depends on the literature that explores the African roots of African American family patterns. Writers such as Gutman, Blassingame, and Kullikoff have attempted to build off Melville J. Herskovits’s early work on African survivals. This literature has been crucial for forming our understanding of black women’s roles during slavery with particular reference to the African roots of these roles.
Unfortunately, this literature also shares certain problems that have clouded our understanding of this African heritage. What concerns me most are the sources that these historians use to compare African and African American slave families. Two major sources have been used uncritically that are particularly problematic when studying African women’s roles in the precolonial era. First, historians have relied on precolonial travellers’ accounts written by Westerners exploring the African continent. These accounts are important sources to turn to—and I have used them myself. But they must be used with great care because it is precisely at the point of describing African women and gender relations that these accounts are most problematic. Often these travellers’ debates over whether or not African women were beasts of burden and whether or not African women were sexually loose spoke to debates in Europe. Rosalind Coward has explored the obsession of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Westerners with gender relations around the world, assuming as they did that these relations were a measure of civilization.38 Needless to say, these travellers brought the sexist visions of their own society to bear on African gender relations, and, therefore, their writings must be used carefully.
But I am more troubled by the second major source used by historians looking for African legacies, that is, anthropological reports written between the 1930s and 1950s. My interest here is not in being a part of “anthropology bashing”—accusing it of being the most racist of the Western disciplines. (Historians, after all, did not believe that Africa even had a history; they rarely turned their attention to its study until the 1960s.) But the use of anthropological accounts in the study of African history is very troubling to me. Used uncritically, as they most often are, these accounts lead historians into the trap that assumes a static African culture. Anthropology can give us hints about the past; but given the dynamic cultures that I assume Africa had in the past, these hints must be treated carefully.
Moreover, there is a particular problem in the use of these accounts for understanding African women’s history. Most of the reports relied on were written in the mid-twentieth century, a time when anthropologists and the colonial rulers for whom they worked were seeking to uncover “traditional” African social relations. They were responding to what they saw as a breakdown in these relations, leaving the African colonies more unruly and, most importantly, more unproductive than they hoped. Young men and young women ran off from the rural areas to towns, escaping the control of their elders. Divorce soared in many areas. The elders, too, were concerned with what they saw as a breakdown in their societies. Both elders and colonial rulers worried that young people made marriages without their elders’ approval and then, finding that they had chosen partners with whom they were no longer compatible, the uncontrollable youth divorced without approval and made new, short-term marriages.
The anthropologists set out to find out what led to this “breakdown” and to discover the customary rules that they felt had restricted conflict in “traditional” Africa. Once again we see the concept of a harmonious Africa before colonial rule emerging. In his introduction to the seminal collection, African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown expressed this concern.
African societies are undergoing revolutionary changes, as the result of European administrators, missions, and economic factors. In the past the stability of social order in African societies has depended much more on the kinship system than on anything else.... The anthropological observer is able to discover new strains and tensions, new kinds of conflict, as Professor [Meyer] Fortes has done for the Ashanti and Professor Daryll Forde shows for the Yakö.39
In part, Radcliffe-Brown and his coeditor, Daryll Forde, offered this set of essays as a guideline to colonial administrators so that the colonialists could counteract the destabilizing influences of Westernization. Such anthropologists obviously felt the need for a better understanding of people
under colonial rule.
Not surprisingly, it was the male elders whom the anthropologists asked about these customary laws, not the junior women and men who now divorced at an increased rate. Martin Chanock points out in “Making Customary Law: Men, Women, and Courts in Colonial Northern Rhodesia” that customary law was developed out of this alliance between the colonial rulers and the elders’ interests. Of course, African elders were unequal partners in this alliance. Yet since both elders and colonial rulers viewed the increasing rates of divorce and adultery as signs of moral decline, they collaborated to develop customary laws that controlled marriages. “For this purpose claims about custom were particularly well-suited as they provided the crucial and necessary legitimation for the control of sexual behavior.”40 Chanock shows the way customary laws in Northern Rhodesia represented increased concern with punishing women to keep them in control. Therefore, in many cases such as adultery, what got institutionalized as “tradition” or “custom” was more restrictive for women than in the past.
It is with this concern of maintaining male control over women and elders’ control over their juniors that many anthropologists of the 1940s and 1950s explored “traditional” African culture. To read their sources into the past could lead us to very conservative notions of what African gender relations were about. Yet Harper-Bolton accepts these views uncritically when she presents as unproblematic a model of gender relations that fails to question women’s allocation to a domestic life that merely complements male roles.41 And, by extension, she buys into an antifeminist ideology. She warns that rejection of African tradition leads women into two directions that are antithetical to healthy developments in African American family life. In one direction, women can fall into loose sexual behavior by accepting Euro-American conceptions of woman and beauty. In the other direction, women become trapped in aggressiveness in the work place and rejection of motherhood. Harper-Bolton argues:What happened to this African American woman is that she accepted, on the one hand, the Euro-American definition of “woman” and attempts, on the other hand, to reject this definition by behaving in an opposite manner. Her behavior becomes devoid of an African sense of womanness. In her dual acceptance/rejection of the Euro-American definition of woman, this African American woman, in essence, becomes a “white man”.42
CAN NATIONALISM AND FEMINISM MERGE?
Not all Afrocentric thinkers need be so blatantly antifeminist. Some African American women have attempted to combine nationalism and feminism. As black feminists have sought an independent identity from dominant white, bourgeois feminism, some have explicitly turned to Afrocentric ideology for their understanding of these gender relations. These efforts stressed that African American women grew up in families that had roots in African experiences and, therefore, were fundamentally different from the ones described by white feminists. Such arguments recognized the need to search for solutions to sexism in black families that are based on their own experiences and history.
One of the most successful attempts to rely on Afrocentric thinking comes from a newly evolving school of thought known as African women’s diaspora studies. This school of thought is represented best by Black Woman Cross-Culturally edited by Filomina Chioma Steady and Women in Africa and the African Diaspora, edited by Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Andrea Benton Rushing, and Sharon Harley and tries to reclaim the African past for African American women. These works have significantly raised the level of understanding of the connections among women in Africa and its diaspora. A number of the scholars published in these books have read extensively about black women around the world and have drawn bold comparisons. For them, women from Africa and the African diaspora are united by a history of “economic exploitation and marginalization manifested through slavery and colonization and ... [in the contemporary period] through neocolonialism in the United States.” 43 Influenced by nationalist impulses, they criticize much of the earlier literature on black women for using a white filter to understand African culture. Further, they persuasively argue that too often black women are presented as one-dimensional victims of patriarchy or racism.44 Instead, these women use African feminist theory as described by Steady to remove this white filter on African American lives and to identify “the cosmology common to traditional African women who lived during the era of the slave trade” and who provided a common cultural source for all black women today.45
Steady is careful to point out that she does not want to romanticize African history as she acknowledges that tensions and conflicts existed in Africa as it did elsewhere. Unfortunately, none of these authors explores any of these tensions and conflicts, and, thus, they present an overwhelmingly harmonious picture. Nor do they clearly articulate the ways that they will unearth the cosmology of Africans living in the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Their footnotes do not reveal any sources on this cosmology that go beyond the problematic anthropological reports that give a malebiased view of the past.
While African women’s diaspora studies take us a long way, they reveal some of the same shortcomings I have criticized in the nationalist writings of Asante and Harper-Bolton. These feminists accept the ideology of complementarity as if it signified equal. They rely on a notion of African culture that is based on biased anthropological reports of a static, ahistorical Africa. Finally, they construct a dichotomy between African feminism and Western feminism that depends on the Afrocentric spirituality/materialism dichotomy. Clearly, these women advocate women’s equality, but they find it much easier to address racism in the women’s movement than sexism in black liberation struggles. In their attempt to combine Afrocentric and feminist insights, they recognize the importance of nationalist discourse for countering the hegemonic ideology that seeks to confine African American lives. But I would go beyond the conservative agenda that nationalists have constructed and, thus, strengthen their advocacy of a feminist discourse.
In the fine special issue of Signs on women of color, Patricia Hill Collins has produced one of the most persuasive attempts to combine Afrocentric thought and feminism. In the tradition of Molefi Asante, she recognizes the need to struggle for increased space within the academy for African American scholars. Although she does not say so explicitly, I read her article in the light of the narrow-minded failure of many academic departments to take Afrocentric scholars seriously and to give African Americans tenure. In recognition of the serious work many women’s studies programs must do to make their classrooms appeal to more than white middle-class students, she tries to sensitize feminists to the worldview that their black students may bring with them to classes but that may be at odds with narrow academic training.
She may have gone too far, however, when she tries to identify an essential black women’s standpoint. For Collins, the black women’s standpoint has evolved from the experiences of enduring and resisting oppression. Black feminist thought is interdependent with this standpoint as it formulates and rearticulates the distinctive, self-defined standpoint of African American women.46 At the same time, black feminist theory intersects with Afrocentric and feminist thought.
For Collins, both Afrocentric and female values emerge out of concrete experience:Moreover, as a result of colonialism, imperialism, slavery, apartheid, and other systems of racial domination, blacks share a common experience of oppression. These similarities in material conditions have fostered shared Afrocentric values that permeate the family structure, religious institutions, culture, and community life of blacks in varying parts of Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and North America.47
Similarly:Women share a history of patriarchal oppression through the political economy of the material conditions of sexuality and reproduction. These shared material conditions are thought to transcend divisions among women created by race, social class, religion, sexual orientation, and ethnicity and to form the basis of a women’s standpoint with its corresponding feminist consciousness and epistemology.48
Thus, the contours of Afrocentric feminist epistemology inclu
de black women’s material conditions and a combination of Afrocentric and female values. Collins’s Afrocentric feminist values shares much with the essentialist cultural feminism of Carol Gilligan, including the ethic of caring and the ethic of personal accountability.49
Collins builds from the black feminist insight that black women experience oppressions simultaneously. Unfortunately, she remains mired in a false dichotomy that limits the value of this insight. For example, while she recognizes the importance of discussing class, she is unable to keep class as a variable throughout her analysis. At times, she assumes that all white women are middle class and all black women are working class. She sets up working-class black women to comment on the lives of privileged white women:Elderly domestic Rosa Wakefield assesses how the standpoints of the powerful [white middle-class women] and those who serve them [poor black women] diverge: “If you eats these dinners and don’t cook ’em, if you wears these clothes and don’t buy or iron them, then you might start thinking that the good fairy or some spirit did all that.... Blackfolks don’t have no time to be thinking like that.... But when you don’t have anything else to do, you can think like that. It’s bad for your mind, though.”50
Missing in such accounts is the position of middle-class black women and working-class white women. In Collins’s view, all white women have class privilege, although she does recognize that some black women have obtained middle-class status. She admits that “African American women do not uniformly share an Afrocentric feminist epistemology since social class introduces variations among black women in seeing, valuing, and using Afrocentric feminist perspectives.”51 She even acknowledges that black women’s experiences do not place them in a better position than anyone else to understand oppression.52 Yet the quintessential black woman is one who has “experienced the greatest degree of convergence of race, class, and gender oppression....”53 Collins certainly does not raise the possibility that class differences may create tensions within the black sisterhood that she takes as unproblematic.
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