Re-visiting THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN: An African Perspective

"...the most significant one being: People who are filled up with Western culture have no right to assume that their understanding of the problems of people from other cultures are even relevant, much less valid."

Dear friends,

Below, I am sharing a book review that I wrote in 1995, for the now-defunct African World magazine (publisher - Chinua Achebe, editor - Okey Ndibe). The book itself helps put the conditions and relationships of the people of the continent of Africa, as a whole, in a more realistic light.

Finally, Male Supremacy rules even in places where White Supremacy doesn't. And it was in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America long before Europeans, the babies of human civilization, knew little more than how to create a heap of garbage. We must end Male Supremacy! That is, if we are genuinely interested in liberation for all people.

One Love, One Heart, One Spirit,
G. Djata Bumpus
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Book review, by G. Djata Bumpus

THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN: An African Perspective (102 pages)
by Florence Abena Dolphyne

Ghana Universities PressAccra, Ghana (1991)

Printed by Assemblies of God Literature Centre Limited, Accra

"What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang..."
Countee Cullen, African American poet

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In spite of its imperfections, this small book is quite important. For it introduces genuine dialogue as well as plans for action in its description and promotion of solutions to the plight of the female preservers of African cultures - that is, African women. With a good deal of the focus on Ghana, the author, Professor Florence Abena Dolphyne (University of Ghana), highlights the International Women's Year in 1975 and the United Nation's Decade for Women (1976-85) as the initial springboards that helped launch a movement that has been slowly making its way through Africa for the last 18 years. Undoubtedly, this publication is a tough "pill" for millions of African men to swallow.

Moreover, Emancipation does several things. They are: 1) It firmly establishes that Western feminists do not have a monopoly on theories pertaining to the oppression of women. 2) It asserts that African women have solutions to their problems within the context of their own cultural backgrounds. 3) It emphasizes action over pretense.

Dolphyne insists that the guiding force for African women, regarding issues relevant to their survival, should be action for change. Thus, she avoids succumbing to the cultural hegemony of fanciful Western feminists. Furthermore, Dolphyne maintains, "I never considered and still do not consider myself a 'feminist', for the term evokes for me the image of an aggressive woman who, in the same breadth, speaks of a woman's right to education and professional training - as well as a woman's right to practise prostitution and lesbianism." Many African American women too complain about the connection between Western feminism and lesbianism. Perhaps, Western feminists' lack of respect for the diverse sexual as well as other cultural practices of non-Western women explains why female circumcision (specifically, clitoridectomy) is their most prominent concern - even amongst many African American women - when analyzing the oppression of African women on the continent.

At times, Professor Dolphyne's perspective is confusing, however. For example, in the introduction (preface), she shares, "... there is the Palestinian woman who has to bring up her children in the violent environment of a refugee camp... Then there is the South African woman who has to cope with bringing up her children single-handed in a squatter camp...There is also the woman in an African village who watches helplessly while her child dies of malnutrition and preventable diseases...For all these women, the issue of women's emancipation cannot be separated from the politics that brought about their situation." Obviously, at least at this point of her work, Professor Dolphyne appears to be employing an inclusive writing style (later in the book she even mentions that young African boys need mandatory and free formal education as much as their female counterparts.) Yet, for whatever reasons, the author absolutely never draws a connection between African women on the continent and their sisters in the Diaspora.

Not surprisingly then, Dolphyne makes no mention of the relationship between Pan-Africanism and the worldwide liberation of all African people.
On top of that, although Professor Dolphyne herself represents the legacy of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, she deliberately took a swipe at the great statesman and philosopher by calling his government, on her first mention of it, a "regime".

Some of the problem seems to rest in the author's use of the "discipline" of cultural anthropology for her theoretical basis. Perhaps, this may help explain some of the book's shortcomings. For cultural anthropology, at least to me, is a euphemism for racial science. It recognizes trivial aspects of any given people's existence while ignoring the necessary relationships that folks must enter into in order to feed themselves. As a result, the culture of a people is defined (sophisticated or unsophisticated, that is, inferior or superior) within the context of its corresponding features or lack thereof with the "higher aspects" (i.e., visual art, music, religion, and so forth) relative to those fabrications that are identified as European cultures.

The subject matter of the text is divided into three chapters. In the first chapter, called "Traditional Practices," the author gives the reader an overview of the psycho-socio as well as economic factors of familial relationships between males and females in African cultures, revealing the status of most - but not all - women in African cultures as property. However, Dolphyne makes it clear that, unlike European cultures (which are not very old), African cultures are steeped in long traditions, many of which (for example, polygamy, child marriage and female circumcision) are quite acceptable to the practitioners. She, therefore, sees one of the real solutions for combating social inequality as, "...it is crucial that basic formal education be made available and accessible to both boys and girls in all (African) countries if any headway is to be made in eradicating, or even modifying the traditional practices that continue to keep women in subordination in Africa." Dolphyne also points out that many of the decisions that African women have made historically regarding their personal relationships have been based on economics. As a result, she sees it as pertinent to African women's emancipation that they have the "independent" ability to care for themselves and their children.

The second chapter, "Promoting Women's Emancipation through Specific Activities," details some of the methods and programs instituted - in this case, Ghana specifically - that have helped to raise "self-esteem and self-confidence" in many women. Moreover, Professor Dolphyne asserts that while there are some women with respected status in African nations, "Such hereditary position of authority is, however, not accessible to the majority of women." The author then continues to reiterate the need for formal education and economic independence for African women as a major step towards emancipation.

Unfortunately, Dolphyne does not provide readers with a clear understanding of certain concepts - such as role model, formal education, and economic independence - that she uses repeatedly throughout this chapter, particularly, and the book, generally. After all, the meanings of most social terms are not the same for everyone. That is, a member of a particular social, political, and economic class will necessarily have an entirely different understanding of or appreciation for a specific social concept than a member of another class, even though both persons live in the same society.

Anyhow, the final chapter, "The Way Forward," mainly identifies, uncritically, those organizations or groups that have participated in providing assistance to Ghanaian women in the past 15 years or so. One of the groups favorably mentioned (more than once in the book, regrettably) was US AID. To be sure, AID (Agency for International Development) - a U.S. government bureau - has not been good for Africa, either economically or environmentally (see America the Poisoned, by Lewis Regenstein). Yet, here Professor Dolphyne seems to be playing the role of being a "pragmatist" - one must suppose. Is it wise to attain "freedom at any cost"? In fact, is said freedom acquired at any cost, really desirable?

It may be instructive for us to refer to an article by Elizabeth Schmidt that appeared in a journal called Food Monitor-No. 5 (July/August 1978) during much of the same period that Dolphyne points to as being relevant to some African women's economic progress. The article is about the effects of OPIC (Overseas Private Investment Corporation), another U.S. government "aid" agency. Created in 1969 by an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, according to its architects, OPIC was intended to "serve as an impetus to private investment in developing economies". Actually, their claim is misleading. As Schmidt recorded:

Although it would be unfair to write off all OPIC-sponsored projects as detrimental, their actual developmental impact is negligible. In 1976, an OPIC loan helped to establish the Pioneer Food Cannery in Ghana, a joint enterprise of Starkist Foods, Inc., and a Ghanaian businessman. The cannery, a renovated Russian mackerel cannery, has the capacity to annually produce 206,000 cartons of canned tuna and 67,000 cartons of tuna cat food. Nearly all of the tuna is exported to Western Europe.Sorry Charlie, but something here is not right. It looks as though the purpose of OPIC, judging by its actions as opposed to its rhetoric, has been to insure that Western "transnationals" maintain control in the so-called Third World. As the late Walter Rodney taught us some time ago in his classic, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and Lloyd Hogan informed us in his equally important Principles of Black Political Economy, whether male or female, African peoples cannot possibly expect to have meaningful political or economic freedom, without control over the manner in which we acquire access to a food supply along with the "artificial" or human-created needs which result from the prolonged existence that adequate nutrition provides.

In summary, Professor Dolphyne has articulated the particularities of the African woman's often powerless condition. Also, THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN: An African Perspective is a healthy contribution to the current dialogue regarding this matter. Yet, the omissions mentioned earlier involving Dolphyne's lack of clarity when presenting certain ideas as well as her unwillingness to challenge the harm still being done by transnational corporations to the development of a united Africa should not be taken lightly.In other words, although this book is highly recommended, not only for Africans on the continent, but those in the Diaspora, as well, Emancipation does have a number of noticeable shortcomings. Nevertheless, there are some extremely important messages delivered in this work. Perhaps, the most significant one being: People who are filled up with Western culture have no right to assume that their understanding of the problems of people from other cultures are even relevant, much less valid.