Decolonization and Afro-Feminism

by Sylvia Tamale

Why do so many Africans believe they cannot break the “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” cycle? Six decades after colonial flags were lowered and African countries gained formal independence, the continent struggles to free itself from the deep legacies of colonialism, imperialism and patriarchy. Many intellectuals, politicians, feminists and other activists, eager to contribute to Africa’s liberation, have frustratingly, felt like they took the wrong path. Analyzed through the eyes of Afro-feminism, this book revisits some of the fundamental preconditions needed for radical transformation.

The main focus of Decolonization and Afro-feminism is unlearning imperial power relations by relearning to “shake off” the colonial filters through which we view the world, including the instruments of law, education, religion, family and sexuality. It re-envisions Pan-Africanism as a more inclusive decolonizing/decolonial movement that embraces Afro-feminist politics. It also challenges the traditional human rights paradigm and its concomitant idea of “gender equality,” flagging instead, the African philosophy of Ubuntu as a serious alternative for reinvigorating African notions of social justice. If you are a student of Africa or in a space where you wish to recalibrate your compass and reboot your consciousness in the struggle for Africa’s liberation, this book is for you.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Race, African Literature, Theory, Politics, Africa

411 pages, Paperback

Published February 1, 2020

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Popular activism has elevated the topics of antiracism, decolonization, and feminism to mainstream discourse, introducing new audiences to an opportunity for critical reflection on the structures and beliefs that affect how people of different backgrounds see themselves, are seen by others, and are supported or inhibited in their pursuit of their goals. A first step in engaging with this opportunity is to illuminate the structures and beliefs that are invisible to many, especially white American men, such as myself. As this book has received less than due attention in the Global North, in this review I make the case for why you should read it.

Sylvia Tamale is a Ugandan academic and human rights activist. She has advocated for the rights of gay men and lesbians in Uganda (a place of rampant homophobia), defended the nude protests of Stella Nyanzi-- a fellow Ugandan academic turned human rights activist for women’s rights and political freedom -- and more broadly Tamale has served as an unshakeable advocate for African women. She brings to this topic not just this experience but also a doctorate from the University of Minnesota in sociology and feminism, a Master of Laws from Harvard Law School, and a Bachelor of Laws from Makerere University in Uganda.

Jessica Horn, Feminist writer and co-founder, African Feminist Forum Working Group, and Oyeronke Oyewumi, author of “The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses” speak to the contribution of the work.

“Decolonization and Afro-Feminism... brings an encyclopaedic rigour and a committed feminist analysis to the study of decolonization and what it offers as a liberatory praxis in contemporary Africa," writes Horn. "Sylvia Tamale’s scholarship has always been rooted in solidarity with the lived struggles of African feminists, queer communities and African academics, and it shows in her exploration of the many challenges that have shaped contemporary struggles around gender, sexuality, race, justice and Africa’s freedom. Essential Reading.”

“In this boldly argued and well-written book, the seasoned intellectual/teacher/activist Sylvia Tamale presents Africa as an urgent decolonial Pan-African project,” writes Oyewumi. “Using an Afro-feminist lens, she gives us a roadmap as she deconstructs gender, sexuality, the law, family and even Pan-Africanism. Decolonization and Afro-Feminism makes a major epistemic contribution to charting Africa’s way forward. A comprehensive effort, it should have a broad appeal transcending disciplines and other colonial borders.”

Oyewumi and Horn summarize the value of this work well, and with an authority I lack. The rest of this review provides some additional context for people who, like me, are untutored students in these fields, because the insights in this book related to popular misconceptions of knowledge, economic coercion, and the injustice of our legal and penal systems, are applicable and of interest to everyone, whether you care about the concerns of African women (you should) or not.

The scope of Decololonization and Afro-feminism is broad, providing a survey across topics ranging from how westernized ideas about knowledge and justice are perpetuated through the modern African university to the replacement of traditional restorative justice practices in Africa with incarceration to the financial encumbrances placed by France on its former colonies to the role of “science” and western dualistic beliefs about gender in the dehumanizing experience of intersex athlete Castor Semenya to the inadequacy of a human rights movement built on western legal principles to the cause of pan-African -and in particular African women’s- liberation.

Through these topics, Tamale illustrates how racialism, capitalism, patriarchy, homophobia, and coloniality (i.e., the “configurations of global hierarchical power relations and the dominance of Eurocentric knowledge system”) are entangled, both in their spread across the world generally, and in Africa specifically, as well as in how they reinforce one another.

A typical chapter “Decolonization and Afrofeminism” is about 40 to 50 pages buttressed by more than 170 citations. The citations vary broadly, from John Rawls to Silvana Tapia Tapi’s “Sumak Kawsay, Coloniality and the Criminalisation of Violence against Women in Ecuador to dissenting legal opinions in Ugandan court cases to personal interviews with feminist activists to Chikwenye O. Ogunyemi’s “Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English.” The above examples are just a random sampling to illustrate the breadth of knowledge that Tamale brings forth in this work -- a breadth often missing from Global North discussions on these topics.

The book itself is a visible example of how one can disagree with how the Global North perceives valid knowledge, objectivity, and rigor and produce vigorous knowledge that is clearly both more truthful and insightful than works produced with a pretense of aperspectival objectivity. Its success as a work is in itself an illustration of the weakness of the strictures and norms of our understanding of knowledge and how we best attain it in the Global North.

The tone and framing of the work is forward-looking and cautiously-optimistic. It is a guide to fellow travellers on the structures and beliefs that bind liberation -- so that their roots might be cut. It is a nod to which voices on this topic to listen to -- itself important at a time of largely white opportunists from the Global North self-assuredly positioning themselves as experts. It is a warning on what false doors to be weary of -- such as the conceit that objective science or human rights legal frameworks lead beyond, rather than reinforce the control of colonial relations of power and worldview. It is a recalling of traditional practices and beliefs (e.g., the concept of Ubuntu) that hold promise as alternative systems of knowledge and justice, and a celebration of recent victories of the Afro-feminist movement that provide visible evidence of the possibility of this future for African women (and by extension, all of us.)

Tamale centers African women as an intersectional cornerstone, but in narrating the power relations and knowledge systems that oppress this group reveals that this same structure of power relations and worldview obfuscates reality and corrodes things (such as the environment) and people of all races, genders, and abilities (though of course not close to in even measure). The connection between colonialism, racial capitalism, and patriarchy is not just asserted, but explained. Tamale illustrates how, in the words of Walter Mignolo, “The expansion of Western capitalism implied the expansion of Western epistemology in all its ramifications, from the instrumental reason that went along with capitalism and the industrial revolution, to the theories of the state, to the criticism of both capitalism and the state.”

Decolonization and Afro-feminism is a book focused not simply on decolonization (though this is necessary), but rediscovery and reconstruction: "reclaiming our humanity; rebuilding our territorial and bodily integrity; reasserting our self-determination; restoring our spirituality; dismantling the material and symbolic foundations of the colonial-capitalist state; decentering Western hegemonies of knowledge and cultures regarding race, gender, sexuality, etc.; reparations of historical wrongs; and embracing the Ubuntu philosophy, whose worldview is underpinned by the principles of: “the interconnectedness of all things; the spiritual nature of human beings; collective/individual identity and the collective/inclusive nature of family structure; oneness of mind, body and spirit; and the value of interpersonal relationships.”"

This is a book that should be read by everyone. Its topics -- the nature of knowledge, the practice of justice, for example -- are universal, and "Decolonization and Afro-feminism" has much light to shine on what's broken and how it might be replaced with something more truthful and more just.

You can buy the book at https://darajapress.com/publication/d....

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the things that seems to puzzle many is that the bout of ‘decolonization’ in the third quarter of the 20th century – what some call juridicial-administrative independence, and what Sylvia Tamale calls ‘flag decolonization’ in this powerful, richly layered exploration of power in contemporary Africa – did little to bring about a state of freedom. A large part of this lies in the observation widely attributed to Steve Biko, one of the anti-apartheid struggle’s key thinkers, that the most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. Tamale, a Uganda-based legal scholar, takes this idea and explores it not in abstract psycho-philosophical ways, but in the very real ways systems of power play out in peoples’ lives.

At the heart of her argument is the notion that despite ‘flag decolonization’, cultural and intellectual systems of authority and dominance continue to hold sway in social, cultural and other everyday ways. Here she identifies four principal ways that Indigenous ways of knowing are marginalised and colonialism (as a mode of thinking and being) are reproduced and sustained. These methods are ones we can all quite easily recognise, where ‘Othering’ accentuates the difference of the stranger and not our commonalities; where Indigenous (non-colonial) ways of being and knowing are undervalued to the extent of becoming invisible; where the complexities of being are reduced to binary logic with one part of that binary granted Power and universal authority; and where those universalised ways are made authoritative – and in being so become close to unassailable. One of the pleasures of this text is that this explicit statement of coloniality’s ways of operating comes late in the piece (about 2/3 of the way through) with the effect that the conceptual and theoretical points make sense as flowing clearly from what has gone before.

That said, the case opens with some definitional stuff as well, outlining the key concepts to follow: this might need some care and patience – not because of fault or error, but because some of these ideas a large and complex, with the nuance and subtlety that can come with that. That said, Tamale is very good at grounding much of this discussion in ‘real world’ experience, drawing out distinction between what she calls the political and psychological in decolonization, highlighting the multiplicity of ways we exist in our social networks (as part of an intersectional unpacking), and accentuating the patterns and dynamics of gender as well as the distinctiveness of Afro-Feminist ways of making sense of those patterns and dynamics.

Possibly because of her legal training she is very good at the relations between structure (‘rules’ and institutions) and experience as she unpacks ways that those structures disempower women through rules around gender, sexuality, bodies, notions of the family as well as ‘higher level’ concepts such as human rights and customary law. If this was all this book did then I’d be happy with it as a series of case studies and unpacking of issues and questions, but she goes a step further. The analyses come together in a powerful unpicking of the gendering of notions of Pan Africanism as a decolonial practice that sustains patriarchal power and dominance. This unpicking leads to a useful discussion of ‘what is to be done’, and a reminder of just how big that ‘doing’ needs to be – partly because of the diversity of Africannesses that there are, partly because of the complexities of the intersectionalities she draws out.

That question of diversity of ways of being ‘African’ is an important part of the issue, and a site of vulnerability. Tamale is quite open early in the discussion that her use of ‘African’ and ’Western’ as categories hides a myriad of distinctions, so makes sure to delve as much as possible into specificities – at times down to the level of individual legal cases and specific moments of political and social contest and struggle. In this way she fairly carefully manages those tensions between the general and specific. I particularly welcomed this in her deployment of the notion of Ubuntu as an Indigenous alternative to oppressive, individualising rationalities of modernity. Too often I see this term deployed unproblematically, as if it is a universal across the continent. Tamale is much more cautious, noting its origins in South African discourse and practice, highlighting that many of the key ways of thinking towards decoloniality are more advanced in South Africa than elsewhere, while also noting that it encapsulates some key principles that are shared and manifest in different ways across the continent.

There are limits to this specificity however. North Africa is less well represented than the rest of the continent, but she also makes very clear that colonial imposition comes from several sources including but not only the spread of religious ideas, practices and institutions associated with both Christianity and Islam as well as other dynamics of occupation throughout the growth of Europe’s empires. The second limitation lies in the risks of moving across multiple sites and questions. For instance, there is a rich exploration of definitions of gender and sexualities that Tamale explores through an discussion of the comparative treatments of Caster Semenya and Michael Phelps by international sports governing bodies, but that fails to recognise the roles and presence of different governing bodies and subsumes Semenya and Phelps under the same set of rules where there are different organisations for swimming and athletics. This glitch doesn’t undermine her point, but it does risk making it less credible.

The diversities and complexities of ‘Africa’ and the details of specific cases therefore mean that this is not a comprehensive and holistic analysis but one that poses as many questions about local and specific circumstances as it does provide ways to think through and around those cases. That is to say, as rich as the detail of the discussion is, this is as good to think with as it is an exploration of the specifics of the coloniality:Afro-feminist contradiction. The richness of the material also flows from Tamale’s grounding of her investigation and analysis in specific as well as generalised feminist and queer struggles and relations.

These factors combine to make this an important and significant contribution to a growing body of work that is moving us well beyond the limitations of flag decolonization to a more deep seated set of decolonial struggles. We’re a fractious lot, those of us who work in and around these decolonial ideas and struggles – and while this book may be limited to a specific academic readership, it’s also an important step along that intellectual road and the struggles it links with.

[Phoebe Oyugi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prof Sylvia Tamale writes about very topical issues. This is the first book I have encountered which discusses decolonization from a feminist perspective. It is a book whose time has come and it's stimulating and thought provoking. Prof Tamale dedicates the book to Wanafunzi wa Afrika (students of Africa),a vast, diverse and fast growing population.

In her introductory chapter she recognizes the complexities of writing about Africa as a continent: that it is a vast continent full of diversity but at the same time its bound together by (traumatic) similarities. She says:

Africa is a vast continent of fifty-four countries with diverse and
rich cultures and different relationships to economies. It is thus
impossible to generalize about “Africa.” Numerous differences
abound even within the 54 countries. Depending on the context,
these exhibit important variations in the ways the continent’s
myriad communities and groupings deal with birth, marriage,
descent, death, succession and so forth. Moreover, as these cultures
encounter rapidly-changing societies, they adapt and evolve. As
Charles Ngwena argues, “Africanness presents itself in the form of a
lifelong conversation without an end precisely because of the ever-
evolving, unfinished, unfolding multiplicities of conjectural African
identifications at play in the grand drama of life."

At the same time, she acknowledges the similarities that bind us together as a continent. Thus she says:

"Sitting at the bottom rung of the racialist construct, Black people
have a common cause regardless of location, ideology, class, gender
and other life circumstances; “blackness” becomes their tribe, their
nationalism. Hence, my references throughout this book to
“Africans” or “African culture/tradition,” by no means indicates that
I am unaware of the diversities; I use the terms advisedly and
politically to capture the shared heritage of African belief systems,
as well as the people’s shared and enduring legacies of enslavement,
colonialism, racism and neoliberalism."

I am still reading the book and will keep updating this review as I go along

[Flora Mutere]

Intense, and I am Tamale's target audience - Wanafunzi wa Afrika. Accurate conceptual frameworks for Afro Feminism(s) theory. Chock full of references then her style she speaks with her chest unrelenting force first chapter to last. This book is a keeper!

[Lulu Cao · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only read half of this book for my reading group. The general impression it gives me is that it has a lot of too broad descriptions and in turn too vague to outsiders. It cites a lot of people's works but sometimes it cannot explain succinctly these citations' points. Despite these weaknesses, it provides a rich bibliographical picture of colonization and decolonization projects in the African continent. It truly makes me understand Africans' long-term struggles against colonizers and hopes for harmony, their connection to nature, and their ubuntu philosophy. People who are seeking an alternative to capitalism and neoliberalism, who are keen to learn contemporary decolonial projects, or who ponder about the value of Gender and Women's Studies might want to take a look at it.

Here is the central message from Tamale: Africans must think beyond undoing and reversing colonization; they must reconstruct their relationship with colonizers. Decolonization and decoloniality should fundamentally be about restoring Africans’ dignity. The goal is to achieve collective forms of public authority with the power structures that colonizers established in the continent. The core step is to prioritize "global and local struggles" over power structures that colonizers built in the nations. I understand this goal as seeking compromise and harmony with colonizers, addressing the unjust and oppressive elements in their systems, and restoring Africans' dignity.

[M. Ainomugisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tamale’s splendid volume dovetails Afro-feminism with decolonization and decoloniality in a manner that has not been discursively undertaken before. Decolonization and Afro-Feminism is so encyclopedic and rich on the matters it takes on, even the footnotes are a great place to wander.

Highly suggest for anyone interested in decolonization, intersectionality in direct application to the African context, Pan-Africanism, and more along those lines.

Sharply written. Epistemically shifting.

[Louise Hazell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes! We need more of this kind of research.

[Maro · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for a uni class and found it very thought-provoking and well-written, though quite repetitive at times. Still a very important book that covers a lot of topics and explains intersectional feminist decolonist approaches.

[Yuneece · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite some repetitive parts, this is a VERY incisive and important book. And oh, so well written.