Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí offers a central argument in response to contemporary gender revolutions—Africans do not need to invent anything. Centring her deductions on the evidence within Oyo-Yorùbá that point to an inherent deference to seniority rather than gender and matrifocal namings of self and others ( ọmọ-ìyá), Oyěwùmí argues for a need to turn to African cultural epistemologies as extant truths that break Euro-American feminist epistemologies. Essentially, Western feminist thought deeply centres on a rigid, universal idea of gender as the dominant system of classification based on sexual differences, and the meanings and roles assigned to one and the other. With Oyo-Yorùbá culture, Oyěwùmí draws on the evidence in the language and the structure of social organizing to make the overarching statement: ‘Yorùbá don’t do gender.’ In primary school, we were often taught that the nuclear family is the smallest and most basic unit of the family. The nuclear family is that enclosed structure from which our understanding of political and moral agency is distilled: The man (the leader), the woman/wife/mother (the subjugated embodiment of reproductive and domestic labour, whom Oyěwùmí argues cannot be read independently of these mutually constituted labels), the children (boy and girl who grow up into a structure of gender sameness where the boy becomes the man and the girl becomes either the reproduced woman/wife/mother or becomes dissatisfied and agitated with this structure).  

Oyěwùmí’s central argument is that the feminist figure that emerges from the dissatisfaction cannot see beyond the family as the ‘everything’ of her oppression, and because of that, she cannot see race or class as these exist beyond the realms of this structure. Therefore, the hyper-nuclear Eurocentric foundations of Western feminist thought alongside white colonizer logic disregard structures of many African societies, including what she describes as fluid, situationally-contingent relations that have little to do with human bodies or sexual differences; where a biological woman can be ọkọ to an in-marrying biological woman or a biological man can be ìyàwó to his deity, and where everyone’s pronouns are inherently non-binary: ‘òun’, ‘wọn’, ‘iwọ’ etc. I find Oyěwùmí’s arguments very subversive, especially for the alternative imagining that they offer us to dismantle the deeply rooted Eurocentric points of view and the NGO-developmental narratives claiming to transform Africa’s gender regression. 

Yet I would argue that while some geographies of genderlessness or more appropriately gender fluidity are evident in the very convincing instances that Oyěwùmí centres, in conversation with Nigerian anthropologist, Ifi Amadiume and Ghanaian academic, Kwesi Yankah, there was nonetheless an overarching phallus signification, in the Charles Lacanian sense. The concept of a body with a phallus was a privileged signifier that stabilized discourse within a Yorùbá context where the body without the phallus was perceived as not whole—the only marginally stabilizing factors for women being class and seniority. In the specific context of my paternal family in Esa-Oke, in-marrying wives were called ‘eru‘, meaning slaves, lending insights into traditions of rigid patriarchal dominance After years of silencing and within the tensions and limits of wifehood, oral traditions passed through generations of wives reveal that a kitchen performance called eré obìnrin-ilé began that gradually refuted the subject-object relations of the Faniyi men and their wives, beginning a hundred years ago and continuing till date. Using music and performance as channels of economic empowerment, radical care, and joy, they refused to negotiate their presence but insisted on it and dictated how they were remembered. To be part of that legacy of women refusing ‘subhumaness’ makes me proud beyond measure, and makes me recall the quote, ‘If they tell you, you are too feminist, show them who your mothers were.’ Othering at the level of language inevitably leads to othering at a deeper emotional level, and while Yorùbás might not do gender insofar as situationally contingent references and non-gendered pronouns, Yorùbá did gender in its positioning ọkọ as superior to ìyàwó, where even female ọkọ is superior to female ìyàwó, and reinforced the idea of woman as lacking or incomplete compared to man. What made Yorùbá the hyper-gendered culture and language it is today is expressed in Oyěwùmí’s arguments: coloniality. The imposition of Victorian patriarchy in a system where women nonetheless found visible spaces to create alternative conceptions of self despite the privilege and authority assigned to men, meant that these alternative geographies were catastrophically disrupted. Men were assigned apical privilege even though they were read as animals, thus effectively removing African women from the political category of humanness and womanhood. It is at this intersection that African feminist and literary scholar, Molara Ogundipe, would theorize the mountains inhibiting women in Africa as colonial oppression, traditional/cultural oppression, backwardness, men, colour/race, and herself. On the notion of sexuality, she tacitly wrote: ‘Africa does not know its sexuality.’ 

I have always deeply connected to the conceptualization of queerness in the Cathy Cohenian way of one’s relation to the state and by extension colonial power. Therefore, I question what is rendered discreet, in the contemporary NGO brokerage that portrays Africa as a feminized and queer hell as opposed to the West as its heaven. I find in this the persistence of colonial language and tactics, reminiscent of colonial voyage writers like Gordon Sinclair, who caricatured a Sàngó priest as a ‘self-styled imp’ saying ‘mumbo jumbo’ to keep thunderstorms away, while dressed like a woman. These narratives have evolved to paint Africa as inherently backward and rigid, while positioning the West as the arbiter of gender fluidity and linguistic diversity which we now must audition to fit into, effectively erasing these expressions that existed long before colonial encounters. Therefore, if we submit that to be Yorùbá (and a Yorùbá woman) is to already be queer, if we were to submit Amadiume’s evidence of female husbands and male daughters and the institution of woman marriage in Igboland, it might not be farfetched to claim that to be African is to already be queer, especially considering not just our cultural epistemologies but the historical processes that have removed us from Eurocentric political classification, rendering us to the wild, which in the Taussig sense is the place where signification fails to exist.  

However, in crafting our identities out of this void, we were confronted by multiple tools of epistemic violence: ethnography and anthropology, Christian colonization, laws, prisons, and guns. While there were nonetheless pockets of direct resistance against the totalizing force of coloniality, the modernity that we have inherited is colonial mastery in our relationship to our land, bodies, hair, language, history, and culture. The overarching question thus becomes: if the entirety of our modernity is deeply entangled not just in the political and economic but also in social, ontological, and cosmological coloniality, then for whom is this modernity?