LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
2.3 GENDERED LANGUAGE USE
2.3.1 African Critique of Gender Theory
Some of the recently emergent African discourse on gender issues as they relate to Africa includes the African feminist critique of the western approach to the conceptualisation of gender and the over-generalisation of eurocentric norms.
African feminists have argued that the concept of gender has frequently been judged in relation to the Euro-American norms of culture and experience. Mikell (1997) explains gender from an African perspective and argues that the African feminist
See for instance the following studies of language and gender which for the most part focus on monolingual language situations: Coates (1996, 1998) Cameron (1996), (1998); Mills (2002 2004)- Crawford (1995).
approach to the concept differs completely from the western approach, which is based on western forms of feminism since the 1960s. She states that gender dynamics in Africa are different from those generated by western feminism. She points out that the gender struggle in the west is shaped by individualism and patriarchal control over women within capitalist industrialized western societies.
African feminism, she argues, is shaped by resistance to western hegemony and its legacy within African culture. The notion of individualism which is so strong in the west, and the hegemony of western ideas within modern African culture are of significance for this study, because many of my respondents show strong (positive or negative) reactions to this hegemony.
Furthermore, African feminism, according to Mikell (1997), is typically heterosexual, pro-natal, and concerned with "bread, butter, culture and power" issues (1997:4). Mama (2000) and Kolawole (2001) also express concern about the indiscriminate application of western gender theories in Africa. Amadiume (1997) argues that the western notion of family, which is nuclear, differs from that of African society where the extended family system is (or was) practiced. In the West, the typical nuclear family consists (or used to consist) of a dominant husband/father, a subordinate wife and their children. Family experiences within a nuclear group must necessarily differ from those in an extended family.
Oyewumi (1997), in agreement with Amadiume (1997), but with a radical view on the applicability of gender theories to Africa, argues that the application of gender to African realities is problematic, because the concern that has produced gender debates and research is born out of Euro-American women's experiences and desire for change. Oyewumi rejects the western feminists' use of gender as a universalising model for describing women's subordination and oppression. Her argument suggests that 'woman and her subordination' is not universal. Furthermore, Oyewumi's (2002) later work points out that western feminists' concept of gender is deeply rooted in the nuclear family system. The western nuclear family, she explains, is a gendered unit, a 'male-headed two-parent household', where the male head is the
breadwinner and the female is associated with home and nurture. She argues that it is alien to Africa "despite its promotion by the colonial and neo-colonial state, international-development agencies, feminist organisations, [and] contemporary non-governmental organisations (NGOs)" (2002:3). She further argues that within the African family system, which is non-nuclear, the family is non-gendered. She demonstrates this with Yoruba kinship examples where kinship roles and categories are not gender-differentiated. Oyewumi argues that in the Yoruba family, power centres within the family are diffuse and not gender specific, but centred on age.
Power is vested in seniority, based on relative age and not on gender. According to Oyewumi, "seniority is the social ranking of persons based on their chronological ages, and thus the words egbon refers to the older sibling and aburo to the younger sibling of the speaker, regardless of gender. She concludes by arguing that the seniority principle is "dynamic and fluid; unlike gender, it is not rigid or static"
(2002:5).
Oyewumi's generalisations about Euro-American women and their families, as well as about African families, now seem in turn somewhat essentialist and old-fashioned in an intellectual climate which acknowledges the great diversity of African cultures.
In this thesis, diversity of cultures and languages, and therefore of expectations of the self and others, is crucial. Politeness and impoliteness are both related to cultural expectations and the ways in which behaviour conforms or fails to conform to them.
What I am concerned with is a situation in which these expectations are frequently likely to differ.
The above critique nevertheless must acknowledge that the issue of language and gender identities in the African multilingual situation may be different from the images of men and women constructed through choice and style of language use in bilingual or multilingual European communities. The period of African history to which Oyewumi (2000) refers was the pre-colonial era. The findings of this study may allow for an understanding of African pre-colonial and colonial practices as
they survive in the post-colonial generations, especially since Mama (2001) claims that there is no word for 'identity' in African languages.
Bakare-Yusuf (2002), in response to Oyewumi's critique of the conceptualisation of gender, argues that to reject outright any attempt to assign a particular conceptual category as belonging only to the 'West' and as therefore inapplicable to the African situation is to "violate the order of knowledge" (2002:11). She argues that, because for centuries, Africa has been in contact with Europe and Europe with Africa, from this relationship a whole series of borrowed traditions have continually spread and been adopted. She sees the denial of this cultural exchange as a denial of inter- cultural exchange between Africa and Europe.
Members of the groups on which I shall focus, and on which my research is based, though for the most part of African origins, come from a diversity of national, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. No essentialising sense of what is 'Africa' is appropriate to their behaviour or their expectations of each other. For this reason, my research, in dealing with their encounters, is based on 'difference' and not on some purported 'similarity' between all Africans.