Dewesternising feminism: Towards a decolonial african womanism
IN a world and global economic and political system where power and other resources are not shared and distributed equitably, a survival of the fittest mode of life ensues. The classification of human beings according to race and gender has placed women and girls, especially black African ones, at the bottom of the pyramid of life and dignity. For black women and girls, the world is experienced and lived as a huge stage on which they must audition for, get costumed and directed to perform, their defined role as second class citizens. From the surnames of their fathers they graduate into surnames of their husbands and spend their days under the sun as properties of certain men. At another level, women experience and live the world as a big worldwide bed on which women must dutifully live to dramatise their service to men and multiply human beings. At best, the woman exists as a rose to decorate the bed of a man and at worst an accessory and facilitator of masculine appetites and passions.
Typical of the misrepresentation of things black and African in the world, Eurocentric anthropology, sociology and psychology have blamed the condition of black and African women on the beastly ways of the African man who is projected as an incorrigible tyrant and brute at home and away. As a result of this Eurocentric portrait of the African male personality as a violent brute, feminism has been used in Africa as a woman versus men philosophy of anger and hatred. Literally, using the Roman Dutch regime of laws and Westernised grammar of human rights discourse, African and black women have been fired up and set up to attack men as “male chauvinist pigs” that are violent rapists before they are proven innocent.
Pumla Dineo Gqola has described feminist writers in Africa as “rioting writing radical women” who are “exploding against men.” Because of the high voltage and angry militancy with which feminism has been couched, every man becomes a criminal if not a suspect and this has made it impossible for even the most enlightened and progressive men to pay solidarity to feminist struggles and aspirations. Feminism has arrived in the African and black world as a hostile and toxic ideology that has set daughters up against their fathers and brothers, and driven a burning wedge between wives and their husbands.
Inevitably, a battle of the sexes and a war of the genders has been going on and its angry battles do not permit any understanding and solidarity across the troubling gender line. Radical and often times richly funded Eurocentric feminism has created a philosophical dilemma in the African and black world such that what was supposed to be peaceful and loving family life has been reduced into a haunting battlefield culminating in divorces and a production of single mothers and single fathers, and children without family units. Recently, at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, a collective of scholars and philosophers of the global Decoloniality collective gathered to ensure a meeting of minds and an exchange of enriching notes on the dilemmas of decolonising feminism and inaugurating a liberating black Womanism in the Global South.
The coloniality of gender Argentine philosopher, Maria Lugones reflected in significant depth on the relationship that race, class, gender and sexuality have and how they impact on the daily condition of women and girls in the black world, in Africa, Latin America and the Diasporas. Lugones made the definitive conclusion that privileged and powerful middleclass white women in Europe invented feminism as a social sport of power play between themselves and their powerful white men in their privileged white imperial world. In this social sport of power games, black men and black women have never been players because in the imperial and white supremacist logic that runs the world, blacks are animals of lower human rank who do not qualify in the sports of humans.
Philosophically, Maria Lugones stated that blacks have no gender, and therefore, they have no business in gender wars. Animals can be female and male depending on their genital furniture but can never be men and women. Feminism, in the compelling view of Maria Lugones, is like other power games, a European game that women and girls of colour can only play poorly and at their great expense. Further, Lugones noted that the woman versus men war that feminism has sparked in the black world takes attention away from the global crime against humanity where blacks at large have through slavery and colonialism been denied their membership of the exalted human family. Before black women and black men enjoy the luxury of engaging in social sports of power, in gender wars, their humanity needs to be established and asserted. In the context of the African and the black world, feminism exists as that angry energy and spirit that keeps black men and black women at war in a world where economic and political power are scarce and life itself, late alone dignity are a dwindling resource.
In the black and African world, feminism as activism and also a school of thought and theoretical framework becomes an imposed pedagogy that keeps the oppressed of the world fighting each other and not fighting the oppressors of the world. The power for which black feminists fight black men is a power that does not exist as the global economy and polity is not under the control of blacks but white supremacists. Maria Lugones and other members of the Decoloniality collective, of the Global South and the Global North, demanded an urgent but totally new look at the challenges of domestic violence, rape, marginalisation and other forms of the violation of women in the Global South.
That women and girls of the Global South continue to be violated and marginalised was not denied but acknowledged. The apportioning and distribution of blame, however, was not directed solely at the beastly black man but the larger world system of classification and hierachisation that has placed black and African women at the bottom of the pyramid of life and dignity in the globe. Feminism is described by the Decoloniality collective simply as an extension of coloniality of gender where Europeans are sold to imposing their worldviews and theories on peoples of the Global South the way ill-fitting clothes are handed down to the poor who wear them and walk around as caricatures and not dignified individuals. Feminism and gender war are ill-fitting ideological garbs for black women. Decolonial womanism was proposed as the philosophy of liberation that black women and men can mobilise and deploy in the struggle for the liberation, empowerment and protection of girls and women in the black world.
The liberation, empowerment and protection of girls and women in the Global South are the responsibility of all the black people. Decolonial womanism as a philosophy of motherhood and familyhood, also brings to light the violation of all children and the plight of men and women with disabilities. The struggle against the violation and marginalisation of women and girls in the black world should be tackled first at family and community levels. Schools, churches, the media and other civic society organisations and institutions are called upon to ensure that their platforms are used to conscientise society to collectively mount a militant activism against violence, insult and marginalisation of women and children.
Decolonial womanism is not conceptualised as a profession or political movement, a source of funds for enterprising and profiteering NGOs, but a liberatory attitude to life that is informed by an acute awareness that coloniality of gender is part of the global coloniality of power, knowledge and being that defines the present Euro-American centred world system. Africans, Latin Americans and Asians are encouraged to go back to their histories and cultures to salvage values, ideals and ethics that have always been used to centre women and children as respected and valued members of families and whose liberation and empowerment is the empowerment of the entire black race and world.
Decolonial womanism militantly rejects the imposition of theories of womanity, concepts of struggle and languages of womanist debate and argument that are imposed from those centres of the world that are complicit in the enslavement and colonisation of the world, historical processes that got women isolated and excluded as lower rank citizens in the very first place.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic that is based in South Africa: mailto:decoloniality2016@ gmail.com.