The Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB) hosted last Thursday in its belvedere, as part of the events of the Biennale of Thought, the seminar Africa and Afrodiaspora facing gender worldsin fact a meeting of Afro-descendant women from different academic and professional fields, who shared their experiences and visions with the Nigerian sociologist Oyèrónké Oyewùmí, a reference in the field of the study of gender on the African continent as a colonial imposition.
Oyewùmí, professor of sociology, gender studies, and African studies at the State University of New York, won the African Studies Association’s Distinguished Africanist Award in 2021, as well as the American Sociological Association in 1998 thanks to its reference work. : The invention of women. An African perspective on Western gender discourses.
The invention of women It is a work which marked an important milestone in its time and which is still today considered a reference in African studies on gender, because it corrects the Western vision of gender in the context of Africa. Always taking Yoruba culture, in which he grew up, as a reference, Oyewùmí analyzes in his book the social and spiritual models that existed before colonization and those that remained afterward.
She concludes from her studies that the enslavement of women described by the majority of anthropologists is not universal, but rather comes from the globalization of the Western, Judeo-Christian gaze on colonized societies. The academic argues that the scale of hierarchies in Yoruba culture did not depend on gender but on the age of the tribe members, which, after colonialism, became the preeminence of men over women, de facto inventing the concept of gender as a discriminatory fact. .
Blackness as a colonial concept
Oyewùmí presented his theses at the aforementioned seminar, focusing on questioning concepts such as “blackness”, which he says he rejects in most contexts because they are primarily relative to a white, Western view. and colonial. “You’re only black from a white perspective,” he said.
Thus, when asked about the “gender of blackness”, that is to say whether it should be given masculine or feminine connotations, the Nigerian academic was quick to answer this question, assuring that “ it’s hard to answer what the gender of blackness is.” , since it depends on the context”. And he explained that the feeling of darkness that one can feel on the African continent is not the same as that one feels in the white Western world.
“I was once asked what I would say to my 23-year-old self if I could talk to her, and the answer is that I would tell her that she didn’t realize how racist the world was.” she declared. “Because I was born in Nigeria and there, like many other students, I didn’t know that we were black until we traveled to the United States,” she added by way of ‘explanation.
Africanness instead of blackness
Oyewùmí then said: “I would add to the question of gender another one about what the black race is, because it is in reality a simplifying and racist concept, created by the vision that the West has of We. » And he insisted on the fact that “we are only black before white eyes, but in Africa no one defines themselves as a black person, but is distinguished by the ethnic group to which they belong,” he said. continued.
In Africa, no one defines themselves as black, but rather distinguishes themselves by the ethnicity to which they belong.
Oyèrónké Oyewùmí
“And what worries me the most,” he stressed, “is that this Western and racist vision of black people has globalized in other countries, perpetuating stereotypes and prejudices. » However, he concludes that he does not like the concept of blackness and prefers that of Africanness. “If we equate the two concepts, we miss all the creativity and spirituality that the continent contains,” he added.
However, Oyewùmí acknowledged that the concept of blackness can serve in some communities to preserve the culture of their origins, but insisted that he sees it as limiting and simplifying the potential of Africanness.
Yoruba spirituality versus gender concepts
A large part of the theses of The invention of women They rely on Oyewùmí’s studies of the Yoruba religion and the fact that the notion of gender does not exist there. The sociologist maintains in her work that it was after colonization that this “white social construction” imposed itself on Nigerian society. Oyewùmí briefly explained the pillars of the Yoruba religion, which currently survives syncretically in cults such as Santería and Canbomblé in the Caribbean, and cited the concept of “uri” as that which defines the person beyond of his sex.
In the Yoruba religion, there is no notion of gender, but it was after colonization that this “white social construction” took hold.
Oyèrónké Oyewùmí
“We all have a uri,” he explains, “it is a concept that refers to our inner self, but also to our destiny in the world, something that the being chooses before being born, even before to be conceived.” He added that once defined the uri, “which is neither masculine nor feminine”, he must choose a mother to bring him to the world of the living and that in this sense “the relationship with the world is made always through the mother. “and not from the father.”
She then explained that the weight of women – as mothers and not because they are women – in Yoruba culture was considerable, but that it disappeared with colonization, which brought Western conceptions of gender and race and with it the discrimination that results from it. This is precisely the leitmotif of The invention of woman.
Finally Oyèrónké Oyewùmí wanted to refer to transgender people and weird black. “Black transgender women are without a doubt, among women, those who suffer the most discrimination and violence in Western societies, this is something that I have been able to verify,” she declared, before to add to “people”. weird “black” in the discriminatory target.
“More and more transgender people and weird They are interested in my book and assure me that they find in it a space of legitimization for their identity because in its pages the concept of binary gender imposed by the Western vision is refuted, just like the theory. weird“, he declared in conclusion.
