Men, women, temporality and critical ethnography in Africa—the imperative for a transdisciplinary conversation

Abstract

This article addresses concerns of African-based scholars about how we can adequately represent the social heterogeneity and the rich diversity of African subjects. I argue that by prioritising Pan-Africanist solidarity, and in our search for African authenticity, we often represent African social realities as undifferentiated. Consequently, we fail to represent the heterogeneity of societies that African subjects create through their everyday practices. Taking up arguments by Achille Mbembe and Paulin Hountondji, the paper demonstrates how the culturalist insistence on representing African social reality as an undifferentiated African difference, combined with the Africanist essentialist quest for African authenticity, impedes the recognition of social diversity. I propose methodological shifts in order to complicate our representations of African diversity, which the paper illustrates with two case studies; the first is drawn from my own research in Manenberg on the Cape Flats, and the second from work by the well-known Nigerian feminist scholar, Charmaine Pereira. Both demonstrate the need for a methodological intervention that combines finely grained ethnography and feminist insistence on positionality. In this way, scholars who are interested in moving beyond the assumptions of a cohesive Africanity can pay attention to the social heterogeneities of African societies, particularly in respect of gender and sexuality.