African Feminist Research Articles

Religion, gender-based violence and silence: A radical feminist reading of women’s agency in Chika Unigwe’s novel

The intersection of religion, culture and gender-based violence (GBV) continues to provoke critical debates in feminist scholarship and activism. Although substantial steps are noticeable in terms of addressing numerous forms of violence against women, religion and culture in the African context continue to promulgate harmful practices. Chika Unigwe’s novel, The Middle Daughter, highlights a world where religion, GBV, social norms, rape myths, silence and agency intersect, shaping women’s lived experiences. Nani, the protagonist, overwhelmed by the loss of her sister and father merely 2 years apart, is lured by a preacher – a wolf in sheep’s clothing – who shoves her into an abusive marriage. Raped but determined to keep the assault under the tongue, Nani further drifts away from her family, friends and community. Imprisoned and battered, yet, Nani’s silent resilience emerges – a quiet but radical strength that defies religio-sociocultural norms. This study is a review of African feminism in eradicating GBV. It discusses how Unigwe’s radical feminist lens unveils the competing female strength and the limits of silence as a form of women’s agency, thereby critiquing the dominant ‘soft’ African feminist approaches.Contribution: This study adopts a radical feminist theory to critique the ‘soft’ African feminisms which fail to serve women facing the intersectional forces of religion, culture and GBV. It argues that feminist activism in Africa has been going on for a lengthy period, yet the double standards embedded in religio-sociocultural beliefs and practices sustain women’s oppression.

Intersectionality and women's participation in peace negotiations

Abstract The Women, Peace and Security resolutions have consistently called for women's increased participation at all levels in institutions and mechanisms for preventing, managing and resolving conflict. Despite a long history of feminist interventions to disrupt categories of gender as a stagnant, ahistorical or geographically consistent structure, rationales for women's inclusion continue to rest on problematic narratives and assumptions. We draw on twenty-nine interviews with practitioners whom we asked to speak about their experiences in peace negotiations and the expectations placed on women involved in these processes. The problematic narratives and assumptions we identify on the basis of these interviews and academic literature have the effect of diminishing women's agency and, thus, their ability to participate in peace negotiations on their terms. Women contribute positively to the durability of peace and the inclusion of gender provisions in agreements. Still, when women's identities are constructed as one-dimensional, the benefits of women's inclusion remain paradoxically a cause for celebration and a partial gain. In this article, we apply theories of intersectionality, informed by Black and African feminisms, to expose women's subject positions that may be made invisible because of assumptions that continue to be associated with calls for women's participation in peace negotiations.

A Womanist Study of Biliqisu Abubakar’s The Woman In Me

Northern Nigeria is today rife with spontaneous proliferous writing(s) by women authors, arising from the honed systemic patriarchy that relegates them to obedience, social and cultural subjugation, mental and emotional redundancy as well as denies them the space to productively be at par with their talents, giftings and abilities. This problem allows these teaming writers to question the social and cultural practices of the customs, beliefs, thoughts, and value systems of the society they represent, through their writings. It is on the premise of this background that this paper, deploys Womanism into Bilqisu Abubakar's The Woman in Me, to expose this systemic patriarchal hold on the women and shade light on the Womanist strand of feminism as Africa’s perception to what Feminism is to the West. In light of the foregoing, the paper finds that the phenomenon of culture and religion (in all forms), can negatively reconfigure the livelihood of not just the Northern Nigerian woman, but the African woman at large, as well as denying her femininity the space to thrive. The paper thus, concludes by showing that contemporary female writers in Northern Nigeria are emerging and re-evaluating the nexus between them and the erstwhile systemic patriarchy with subtlety, yet firmness to air out their voices to the balanced and safe spaces Womanism, Motherism, Black feminism, African feminism, and the like offer.

Let the Silenced Speak: Digital Platform Usage by Feminist and Gender Equity Nongovernmental Organizations in Ghana

The freedom and acceptance of feminists’ activities in Ghana hit several rocks after the first African Feminist Congress in Ghana in 2004. In Ghana, research on gender advocacy and feminist organizations has increased, but little emphasis has been paid to the contribution of self-identified feminists to women’s empowerment. I explored how self-identified feminists and gender equity-focused NGOs in Ghana leverage social media to educate and advocate for women’s and children’s welfare. I also examined how these feminists and NGOs engage women in rural areas in seminars, discussion sessions, and training workshops to create spaces for women to voice their concerns and gain empowerment. Given this, 17 in-depth interviews were conducted with self-identified Ghanaian feminists and NGO leaders. I employed muted group theory and African feminist theory to guide the data analysis. I argued that Ghanaian self-identified feminists and NGOs have put in a lot of work to empower Ghanaian women to enable them to express themselves and share their experiences. The findings contribute to the discussion on Ghanaian feminism and how they enact empowerment and advance how the growing acceptance of feminism in Ghana allows Ghanaian women to speak for themselves and have their voices heard in national and global digital spaces. Keywords: Freedom, Feminism, Digital platforms, Muted Groups, NGOs

Revisiting the womanist-feminist continuum in Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come

This paper examines the tensions and intersections between feminism and womanism primarily through a consideration of Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi’s theorization of one version of womanism that she bases on a selection of three female-authored Nigerian novels. The essay also includes more recent engagements with feminisms, including those put forward by The Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feminists. Specifically, the paper explores three core elements of Ogunyemi’s theorization of Nigerian womanism — collectivism, compromise, and non-confrontational approaches to women’s resistance — in relation to the representation of Nigerian womanhood in Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come. The paper’s central argument is that while Atta’s novel suggests that Ogunyemi’s recourse to womanism remains a useful way of theorizing [the] Nigerian novel by women,” more importantly, Everything Good Will Come shows that the gap between feminism and womanism might not be as wide as some critics have suggested. The paper concludes that despite disagreements over nomenclature and emphases, Everything Good Will Come instantiates the continuum on which feminism and womanism exist.

Co‐Creating Sensuous Knowledge Through Food Practices With Women and LGBTQI+ Migrants in South Africa

African feminisms have always been informed by activism, but the development of Western‐style separation between thought and action influenced by colonial and apartheid legacies has compromised the scholarly connection between intellectual work and political action. African feminists have thus developed contextualized and critical approaches to mending the relationship between knowledge and power‐in‐action, necessitating meaningful and reciprocal collaboration with communities that experience marginalisation and oppression. African migrants in South Africa represent one of these communities, as they face xenophobic, racist, homo‐ and transphobic discourses and practices in their daily lives, pushing them to the margins of society. At the intersection of African feminisms and the socio‐economic and political discrimination of migrants, we open a dialogue between two PhD projects, both working with women and LGBTQI+ migrants in South Africa. We discuss how our different feminist research approaches (re)centre the lived experiences of women and LGBTQI+ migrants of different national backgrounds, focusing on their bodily and psychological capacities for sensing and sharing pleasure through food practices. We show that the co‐creation of “sensuous knowledge” with migrant research participants enables us to unsettle the oppressive forces that marginalise such communities. Paying close attention to where power is contested, we analyse not only the complexity of how African feminisms translate into liberatory participatory research practices, but also how migrants—through their (re)creation of pleasure and joy through food—challenge and expand how feminisms can be applied across the African continent.

Social work and women's violence care in Morocco

This study explored the challenges and practices of social workers at Moroccan Integrated Care Units for Women and Children Victims of Violence (ICUWCVV) regarding violence as a major public health and social injustice issue. The study was guided by the Ubuntu philosophy, which emphasizes community solidarity, justice and human dignity. The theoretical framework is informed by African feminist epistemologies critiquing and extending African methods of empowerment within care practices. It applied indigenous research methodology through semi-structured interviews with 13 social workers across the Fès-Meknès region. In this paper, we will share the experiences in the field and challenges in operationalizing services. The perceived lack of training and resources in the programs impacts the quality of care provided and the ability to offer empathetic, victim-centered services. A need for training has been identified for all accountable health and social care workers who have access to case notes under the information-sharing protocol. Recommendations are made to contribute to policy development in areas related to continuous professional development support, as well as improved resourcing aimed at providing effective and culturally competent care for victims. These recommendations also emphasize the revaluation and incorporation of African philosophies and knowledge systems into social work practices. The recommendations draw upon national guidelines from governing bodies, outlining best practices and evidence-based methods for delivering healthcare, which service providers are expected to implement. HOW TO REFERENCE USING ASWDNET STYLE Mrabti L., Rhoulam I, Nejjar, F. and Belamfedel Alaoui Z. (2024). Social work and women's violence care in Morocco. African Journal of Social Work, 14(4), 225-232 https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ajsw.v14i4.6 Visit journal website: https://ajsw.africasocialwork.net

Language that denigrates women in selected isiXhosa poems

Language plays a critical role in isiXhosa poetry. Through the play and interplay of morphemes, words, phrases and lines, poets carry their messages to the intended audience. In investigating five (5) isiXhosa poems, we discovered that poets do use language that denigrates women. This language manifest itself in isiXhosa poetry by words, phrases, and lines that paint women as gold diggers, robbers, lacking intellect, promiscuous, properties of men. The discovery was made through the use of qualitative research approach and critical discourse analysis design. The selected data was analysed through the lenses of African feminism, which examines the experiences of women in literature, such as oppression of women, traces of gender inequality, role of women, as well as representation of women. Main findings of the study demonstrate that language used in isiXhosa poetry upholds the ideals patriarchal ideology and logic. It uses language that is gender bias, sexist and anti-feminism. This form of language contributes to gender-based violence, as it represents women as objects of men, lacking intellect, promiscuous. In this paper, we recommend that poets find alternative language in criticising women; using language that uphold dignity of women will not compromise their message. Furthermore, poems that uses language that denigrate women must not be selected to be studied in basic education.

Strandlooping as a relational enquiry to reimagine higher education and gender studies along the Camissa coastline

ABSTRACT Thirty years after democracy in South Africa, the legacy of apartheid continues to affect Black and Brown 1 bodies by excluding them from the ocean and other spaces through the legacies of racist laws which continue to bleed into the present. In this paper, I argue that strandlooping as a method of enquiry is key to understanding care for our hydrocommons. This methodology can also be considered to be a generative way of re-imagining and practicing higher education research and gender studies differently. Strandlooping as a lone, Brown woman along certain stretches of the coastline is unsafe, and this influences the way I work and whom I choose to walk with. I make use of African feminism, Indigenous knowledge and research-creation frameworks in the paper to enact theory-practice-praxis in creative and relational ways. The paper concludes with three suggested watermarks or propositions for strandlooping to encourage knowledge-making with humans and more-than-human entities.

4 - African Feminism and the Recognition of Cohabitation Under Customary Law

Anthony Diala , Rita Ozoemena & Ditsela

Re-Fashioning Femininity and Motherhood in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Zikora: A Short Story”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the postcolonial writers who has made her literary contribution by introducing Nigerian culture to her readers in English. This paper aims to present a re-fashioned postcolonial perspective on the understanding of femininity and motherhood in Nigerian culture and to demonstrate how the perception of these concepts has evolved over generations as illustrated by the mother-daughter relationship in Adichie’s “Zikora: A Short Story” (2020). “Zikora” deals with various issues directly related to the situation of Nigerian women, such as single motherhood, polygamy, sexism and the preference for male children. The article draws on African feminism to explore womanhood as an identity and to emphasise the role that contact with a foreign culture plays in women's self-determination and development as individuals. In the story, the eponymous character is a single woman whose expected child is not wanted by her father. In the final stages of labour, Zikora reflects on her mother's relationship with her father and how she had to stay in the polygamous marriage just because she did not bear her husband a son. This study also shows that “Zikora: A Short Story” is a boldly written story that draws attention to the many injustices faced by Nigerian women in a patriarchal society.

Feminist identity crisis in Africa

Feminist movement in Africa lacks capable guardians to steer the development of feminine identity or theory, and to operationalize the feminist agenda. The apparent lack of a national or continental feminist theory has not helped to elevate the status of the majority of women beyond the patriarchal controls, particularly in the rural and peri-urban communities, despite improved social modernization. Africa’s feminist crisis involves the lack of leadership, ideological vacuity, absence of structure or movement, and the non-application of cultural; political; class; religious and tribal identities in developing feminist theory. In search of capable feminist guardians, the tendency of feminist groups is to co-opt self-actualized African women into feminism with or without their consent, and without regard to the accidental coincidence of those personalities’ narratives with feminist epistemology. Feminism in Africa is in search of relevance within the public space. This paper interrogates these issues and uses the narrative of several self-actualized women in Africa, who have, apparently, been co-opted into feminism as a result, to discuss aspects of the crisis and the delimiting public policy and legislation against, perhaps, the development of feminine identity.

Changing the Frame: New Epistemic Frameworks and Social Transformation in African Feminist Theory

Abstract This article discusses African feminist approaches to decolonization and social transformation. In recent years, there has been a significant shift in African feminist scholarship towards African concerns and Africa-centered solutions. Today’s turn to Indigenous knowledge, social structures, and gender relations is no longer just about shedding light on the precolonial past, but about fundamentally changing the epistemic framework in the sense of developing alternative epistemologies beyond the dominant ‘Western’ framework. But what is meant by ‘alternative epistemologies’? How do African feminist thinkers conceptualize social change today? And how do they relate epistemic and social change in their thinking? These questions are explored in this article, focusing on work by Sylvia Tamale (Uganda), Wangari Maathai (Kenya), and Anthonia Kalu (Nigeria) and drawing on the discourse of ecofeminism and Ubuntu as two models of alternative epistemologies.

“We Have Been Saying This for Thirty Years!”: Exploring Discursive Technologies of Disappearing African Feminist Knowledges

“We Have Been Saying This for Thirty Years!”: Exploring Discursive Technologies of Disappearing African Feminist Knowledges

Pushing against conventions: an African feminist contribution to knowledge-making

ABSTRACT Knowledge-making in universities is shaped by conventions that neglect and/or suppress less conventional kinds of knowledge that may hold viable solutions to society’s problems. Knowledge always has political interests, and close-up research on knowledge-making can liberate marginalized ideas, by exposing how they push against and beyond conventional perspectives and mutations. African feminist theoretical ideas are used to examine three different platforms for knowledge-making: one research project and two courses that were taught. The African feminist praxis is demonstrated through two main processes – reflection and communal knowledge-making – which infuse the methodology and pedagogy of the three platforms. The article shows how they transgress the conventions to bring about inclusive and generative knowledge-making. They provide strategies for future research and teaching experiments, demonstrating ways in which African Feminist ideas can have transformative effects beyond their own margins.

Afroqueerness, Heteropatriarchy, and Transnationality: Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah’s The Sex Lives of African Women

In her anthology, The Sex Lives of African Women (2021), Ghanaian writer and blogger Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah includes thirty-two stories of Black African and Afro-descendant women of different ages and sexual orientations to openly discuss queer and identity issues, family and religious dynamics, sexual freedom and pleasure, and abuses and resistance against heteropatriarchal structures. In this paper, I will first introduce Sekyiamah as a newly emerging African voice in the contemporary writing panorama and briefly examine her story collection. Second, I will discuss how gender and sex were conceived in Africa in precolonial times and how queerness and lesbianism are interpreted in the African feminist tradition. Third, I will show how Sekyiamah’s anthology can be read as a transnational Afroqueer archive by discussing some of the stories included in her volume. Significantly, I will draw on Chantal Zabus’s conceptualisation of “margins” (Zabus 31-32) to capture those spaces of free expression, openness, and resistance against colonial, nationalist, and heteropatriarchal power structures from which Afrosporic women express and manifest their often “dissenting” identities, exercise their agency, and fight for their fundamental human rights.

Analysis of Neshani Andreas's The Purple Violet of Oshaantu as a Presentation of the Writer's Liberal African Feminist Thought to the Inequalities of Rural Namibian Women

ABSTRACT: This study examines the plight of women's rights in a Namibian Oshiwambo traditional male-dominated society, a concept that has not been fully explored in Namibian literature. The article uses the liberal African feminist theoretical framework, whose main argument is that men and women are not different and they should be treated equally. These feminists identify the main cause of female oppression as male domination. The aim of this research is to enable the reader to understand the impact of male dominance as the source of gender inequality and injustice against rural women and to erode the belief that women are inferior to men, highlighting Namibian rural women's capability of owning property and becoming self-reliant. Hence, the study uses Neshani Andreas's work to express this concern and seeks to pave the way to challenge all forms of male domination in an attempt for women to regain their voice, identity, and rights.

There is something special about a woman who dominates a man’s world : an African feminist critique of women characters in indlal’Inamanyala (obscenity) (1994)

<i>There is something special about a woman who dominates a man’s world</i> : an African feminist critique of women characters in <i>indlal’Inamanyala</i> (obscenity) (1994)

Labor of love: Re‐membering dismembered bodies in community research

AbstractEthnographic studies are practically invasive in nature in that they intrude into people's everyday experiences. It is therefore the duty of a researcher documenting experiences of women to pay attention to these forms of violence and undertake the labor of love that seeks to re‐member women's bodies and their stories in ways that restore their dignity and contribute to healing. African feminists have encouraged us to employ research methods that are able to engage stories of trauma and survival that are not triggering, invasive and limited. Intersectional feminism offers a qualitative analytical framework that aims at identifying the interlocked layered systems of oppression that affect the marginalized in society (Yuval‐Davis (2006). Similarly, in employing fragmented narrative as a methodology, there is a realization and acknowledgment of the superficiality of linear retelling as a mode of conveying psychological damage that exposes the relationship between silence, gesture and suffering in revisiting the site of trauma.

Harnessing Kenyan Mothers Knowledge to Counter Violent Extremism: A Contribution to Feminist Philosophical Approaches

The capturing of the knowledge of Kenyan mothers can improve the effectiveness of countering violent extremism efforts. This is because African women possess power and agency within their societies that contributes to their knowledge. This paper analyses the knowledge and experience of mothers whose sons joined the al Shabaab violent extremist organisation in Somalia as a contribution to African feminist epistemology. It interrogates the epistemological representation of African women in violent extremism practice from a knowledge production perspective. The paper explores the contribution of mothers of al-Shabaab recruits to African feminist epistemology on approaches to address violent extremism. Through an African feminist narratological approach, the paper contributes to the reclamation of African women’s place in knowledge production. The paper coins an African feminist grounded theory, ‘Nafsi African feminism’ that denotes that African women’s knowledge is based on a convergence of their power and vulnerabilities borne out of their lived experiences. Through its study findings, utilising the NVivo data analysis software to thematise, the paper reveals that the knowledge of mothers of al Shabaab recruits touches on institutions, processes, structures, and systems including sociology, political science, education, religion, and health. The paper concludes by calling for the reclamation and capturing of African feminist epistemology to contribute to a holistic and effective approach to addressing violent extremism.