Nego-Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa's Way

Nego-Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa's Way

Displace and undo that killing opposition between the text narrowly conceived as verbal text and activism narrowly conceived as some sort of mindless engagement.

African scholars, and especially women, must bring their knowledge to bear on presenting an African perspective on prospects and problems for women in local societies. Scholars and persons engaged in development-research planning and implementation should pay attention to development priorities as local communities see them. -Achola A. Pala nineteen seventy-seven

In nineteen ninety-nine, I was invited to speak at an international conference organized by the "Women Waging Peace Project" at Harvard University's Kennedy School that attracted participants from some of the conflict zones of our troubled planet-Northern Ireland, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Bosnia, the Middle East, Burundi, Angola, and so forth. One of those invited to address the gathering was Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher who has assumed high visibility and substantial recognition in development studies through her articulation of the "human capabilities approach," pioneered in development economics by Amartya Sen, a Nobel Laureate in economics.

After a brief presentation of the human capabilities approach, Nussbaum had barely sat down when she was verbally attacked. The attack was unexpected in its swiftness, visceral in its content, and vociferous in its articulation. The first to speak was an African-American woman who lives in the Harvard neighborhood. In a moving speech she complained bitterly, first, about not having been aware that an event with a high representation of Africa-based sisters was taking place in her neighborhood and, second, about the difficulties she encountered making her way into the conference hall. When she arrived at the Kennedy Center, virtually all the entrance doors were locked. As she tugged at one of the locked doors, she was accosted by a policeman who asked her what "[she] was doing there." The next "plaintiff" was an Africa-based African participant who spoke with a "communal voice," stating that she preferred to be told/ shown what has to be done to ameliorate the situation in her part of the world rather than be bombarded with irrelevant discourses and empty theorizing. Obviously, the theorizing is "empty" precisely because of its inability to connect with or refer to the realities and environments with which the plaintiffs identify. In the midst of the heated argument, Nussbaum perched silently on her chair and issued no response. I stood up not to defend Nussbaum (she's very capable of defending herself) but to issue a cautionary note to the women of color (especially those living and working in Africa) while assuring them that I understood and identified with their frustration and anger at having to sit through interminable "discourses," while the immediacy, messiness, and raw brutality of their conflict-ridden homelands were weighing heavily on their minds.

I was struck, however, by the lack of engagement with the substance of Nussbaum's presentation. She was dismissed for offering irrelevant theorizing instead of a clear road map for action. Although I am sympathetic to the centrality of practice in development work, I am wary of a stance that is so staunchly antitheory that it leaves no room for any engagement with theory. Theory plays a central role in helping to scrutinize, decipher, and name the everyday, even as the practice of everyday informs theory making. One can argue about the use/abuse and the politics of theory, as I will argue in the next section, but to dismiss theory as always irrelevant is not helpful. On the contrary, most Africans with whom I have worked inside and outside the continent argue not for the death of theory but against its use and abuse; particularly, they interrogate the ways in which theory, as a site of political struggle, raises concerns about "invention," appropriateness, and applicability. This leads me to believe, then, that the objection to Nussbaum's presentation was probably not against theory per se but against the failure of the presenter to anchor her theorizing in reality in any relevant or significant way for the "plaintiffs." Nussbaum's fame and privileged social location are epistemically salient in the sense that they authorize her views and writings, but they could also be discursively dangerous in terms of the impact of her views/writings in shaping the lives of women on whose behalf she intervenes. I cautioned my women-of-color sisters not to dismiss Nussbaum for the simple reason that the individuals and foreign/international institutions responsible for making policies that affect the lives of women of color in the so-called third world read Nussbaum and model some of their policies on her views, conclusions, and writings. The best way to engage Nussbaum is to read her writings on gender and development, expose contested terrains (which are many), and offer alternative arguments and paths.

The above incident at Harvard exposes the evolving double apartheid of social and epistemological exclusions that is at the heart of Arjun Appadurai's exposé of the disjunctures festering among diverse constituencies within and between nations in a globalizing world. Globalization, with its incessant shifts and turns, has produced anxieties not only in the academy where disciplinary certitudes are disrupted but also outside the academy where different worries abound:

What does globalization mean for labor markets and fair wages? How will it affect chances for real jobs and reliable rewards? What does it mean for the ability of nations to determine the economic futures of their populations? What is the hidden dowry of globalization? Christianity? Cyberproletarianization? New forms of structural adjustment? Americanization disguised as human rights or as MTV? . . . Among the poor and their advocates the anxieties are even more specific: What are the great global agencies of aid and development up to? Is the World Bank really committed to incorporating social and cultural values into its developmental agenda? Does Northern aid really allow local communities to set their own agendas? . . . Can the media ever be turned to the interests of the poor? In the public spheres of many societies there is concern that policy debates occurring around world trade, copyright, environment, science, and technology set the stage for life-and-death decisions for ordinary farmers, vendors, slum-dwellers, merchants, and urban populations.

The increasing divorce between the parochial debates "about such issues as representation, recognition, the 'end' of history, the specters of capital, etc." in the academy on the one hand and the vernacular discourses and realities of constituencies outside the academy on the other hand demands new and imaginative ways to view and conduct research, one of which is to globalize research from below with the force of an element usually identified with creative writing and the arts-imagination. My extensive work in the past decade with nongovernmental organizations and grassroots constituencies in Africa- ranging from literature, health, and human rights in Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, and Madagascar to ethnicity, peace, and conflict resolution in Rwanda, Burundi, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo-has led me to rethink the place and role of theory, research, and scholarship and to recognize the potency and utility of the force of imagination mentioned above. My work with constituencies beyond the academy illuminates and makes pertinent my work in the academy. This article reflects what I have learned from the men and women I have worked with in the robust, dynamic space where the academy meets what lies beyond it. This juncture where worlds meet is what I call the "third space of engagement" (engagement, in the Sartrean sense of the word). The third space is not the either/or location of stability; it is the both/and space where borderless territory and free movement authorize the capacity to simultaneously theorize practice, practice theory, and allow the mediation of policy. The third space, which allows for the coexistence, interconnection, and interaction of thought, dialogue, planning, and action, constitutes the arena where I have witnessed the unfolding of feminisms in Africa.

In this article I will explore, among other issues, the intertwining of the colonial moment, the politics of fieldwork, and the politics of representation in feminist scholarship and development studies by revisiting the processes of theory making and knowledge construction in an environment of unequal power relations and cultural difference. I will use the different features and methods of feminist engagement in Africa to propose what I call nego-feminism (the feminism of negotiation; no ego feminism) as a term that names African feminisms. Aware of a practice (feminism in Africa) that is as diverse as the continent itself, I propose nego-feminism not to occlude the diversity but to argue, as I do in the discussion of "building on the indigenous" in the last section of this article, that a recurrent feature in many African cultures can be used to name the practice. The diversity of the African continent notwithstanding, there are shared values that can be used as organizing principles in discussions about Africa, as Daniel Etounga-Manguelle aptly notes: "The diversity-the vast number of subcultures in Africa-is undeniable. But there is a foundation of shared values, attitudes, and institutions that binds together the nations south of the Sahara, and in many respects those of the north as well."

Through a brief discussion of the inception of a women's studies program in Africa, I will address issues of disciplinary boundaries, pedagogy, and institution building in an atmosphere of intense nongovernmental organization activities bound and structured by donor interests, conditionalities, and politics. Ultimately, I will plead for the interrogation and repositioning of two crucial issues in feminist studies-positionality and intersectionality. This process will entail a constant interrogation of one's positionality at all levels-from the social and personal to the intellectual and political-as an active subject location of shifting reciprocity where meaning is made and not an essentialized location where meaning is discovered. Finally, it will also envisage a modulated shift in focus of the intersectionality of race, gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, culture, national origin, and so forth from ontological considerations (being there) to functional imperatives (doing what there) and speak to the important issues of equality and reciprocity in the intersecting and border crossing. I argue for going beyond a historicization of the intersection that limits us to questions of origins, genealogy, and provenance to focus more on the history of now, the moment of action that captures both being and becoming, both ontology and evolution. The discussion will proceed in three movements: the second section will address the use/abuse of theory and the marginalization of African women in the process; the third section will examine the importance of culture and difference in debates about theory and development; the fourth section will argue for the necessity and prudence of "building on the indigenous" in the construction of African feminist theory.

Dwelling/duelling on possibilities: Debating theory, knowledge, and engagement

In African studies, as in other branches of humanistic and social research, the subordination of human and social problems to disciplinary trends has pronounced negative effects that undermine the integrity and social utility of scholarship.

Theory makers and their methods and concepts constitute a community of people and shared meanings. . . . Why do we engage in this activity and what effect do we think it ought to have? As Helen Longino has asked: "Is 'doing theory' just a bonding ritual for academic or educationally privileged feminist women?" Again, whom does our theory making serve?

A rapprochement between theory and engagement requires clearing the ground to dwell/duel not only on what theory is but, more importantly, on what theory does, can and cannot do, and should and should not do. The disciplines in which my work is situated-African studies, women's studies, literary studies, cultural studies, and development studies-are affected by or implicated in these processes. Theorizing in a cross-cultural context is fraught with intellectual, political, and ethical questions: the question of provenance (where is the theory coming from?); the question of subjectivity (who authorizes?); the question of positionality (which specific locations and standing social, political, and intellectual does it legitimize?). The imperial nature of theory formation must be interrogated to allow for a democratic process that will create room for the intervention, legitimation, and validation of theories formulated "elsewhere." In other words, theory making should not permanently be a unidirectional enterprise-always emanating from a specific location and applicable to every location-in effect allowing a localized construct to impose a universal validity and application. I argue instead for the possibilities, desirability, and pertinence of a space clearing that allows a multiplicity of different but related frameworks from different locations to touch, intersect, and feed off of each other in a way that accommodates different realities and histories. Nussbaum's concern about the applicability of a single universal framework is equally pertinent here: "And we also need to ask whether the framework we propose, if a single universal one, is sufficiently flexible to enable us to do justice to the human variety we find." Above all, theory should be used to elucidate, not to obfuscate and intimidate.

Like other so-called marginal discourses, feminist discourse raises crucial questions about knowledge not only as being but as becoming, not only as a construct but as a construction, not only as a product but as a process. In other words, knowledge as a process is a crucial part of knowledge as a product. By injecting issues of subjectivity and location into epistemological debates, feminist scholarship seeks, as it were, to put a human face on what is called a body of knowledge and in the process unmasks this presumably faceless body. By focusing on methodology (and sometimes intent), feminist scholarship brings up for scrutiny the human agency implicated in knowledge formation and information management. We cannot assume critical thinking without asking crucial questions about what is being thought critically and who is thinking it critically. But Western feminism is also caught up in its ambivalence: fighting for inclusion, it installs exclusions; advocating change, it resists change; laying claims to movement, it resists moving.

Some decades ago when littérature engagée was in vogue (in France, at least), writing was linked to social engagement. But in poststructuralist contexts, writers and intellectuals erect discursive walls that insulate them from the social action (engagement) needed to promote social change. The emergence of poststructuralist theory as "theory" and the role it has come to play in shaping not only feminist intellectual life but also the investigative paths of literary and cultural critics and other intellectuals of the Left has implications for social action/change. Poststructuralism is "a dead end for progressive thought," as Barbara Epstein argues in her quarrel with "poststructuralism-as-radicalism" and its theoretical claims that have little to do with progressive politics: "I am also dismayed by the subculture that developed around feminist poststructuralism and the intellectual world with which it intersects. In this arena, the pursuit of status and the worship of celebrity have become pervasive, probably more so than anywhere else in academia. Intellectual discourse has come to be governed by rapidly shifting fashions. Work is judged more by its sophistication than by the contribution it might make toward social change. Sophistication is understood to mean agility within a complex intellectual structure, the ability to engage in theoretical pyrotechnics, to intimidate others by a display of erudition."

Poststructuralism's "nominalism," denial of the subject's ability to reflect on social discourse and challenge its determination, thesis of undecidability, and assertion of the "negative function" of political struggles led Linda Alcoff to pose crucial and pertinent questions about poststructuralism's potential threat to feminism itself: "Adopting nominalism creates significant problems for feminism. How can we seriously adopt Kristeva's plan for only negative struggle? As the Left should by now have learned, you cannot mobilize a movement that is only and always against; you must have a positive alternative, a vision of a better future that can motivate people to sacrifice their time and energy toward its realization. How can we ground a feminist politics that deconstructs the female subjectivity? Nominalism threatens to wipe out feminism itself." Poststructuralism's focus on discourse and aesthetics instead of social action encourages the egocentricity and individualism that undermine collective action. The atomization of the intellectual community and the isolation in intellectual work allow, at best, the emergence of "stars" but produce, at worst, a dysfunctional and ineffective family that is not fully equipped to meet the challenges of societal transformation. African studies and women's studies are not immune to these disciplinary trends. African studies' focus on the idea of Africa rather than the reality of Africa mimics women's studies' foregrounding of the notion of the African woman rather than the humanity of African women. In feminist scholarship, theorists of different persuasions are mired in the theorizing and intellectual navel gazing that insulate them from social action and undermine relevance. African feminisms bring up for scrutiny the relationship with and resistance to the endemic feminist politics and theorizing that inaugurate social irrelevance and forestall true engagement-from feminist social and epistemological exclusions to feminist scholarship's disconnection from social utility.

Indeed, with my professional-cum-intellectual trajectory redefining and realigning itself in recent years, I tend to be less charmed and intimidated and more alienated and dismissive of the intellectual gymnastics and empty theorizing in feminist scholarship, as evidenced by my incessant etching of "so what?" as marginal notes in my rereading of feminist texts that awed and humbled me as a graduate student and as a junior faculty member. More importantly, as a teacher I worry about the implications of this state of affairs for upcoming generations of feminist scholars and teachers-our graduate students-who know less about the substance of required texts and more about trendy jargons, with the result that they produce similarly framed responses to different and unrelated questions. Specifically, I worry about my graduate student advisee and her seasonal obsessions with "post" (poststructuralist, postcolonial, postmodernist) jargons. At some point, it was "simulacrum" that she saw everywhere. That lasted for a few months. Then came one that refused to go away-"cleavage." This ubiquitous monster was imbued with meanings that metamorphosed perpetually-from the sacred to the profane. Frustrated by the rapidity with which her dissertation was increasingly "marked" by this monster, I issued a stern warning: "If I see this 'cleavage' on another page of this dissertation, I'll take you off my list of advisees." Cleavage bowed to the threat, sanity reigned, and the dissertation moved ahead.

Even more pertinent to the situation of African women regarding theory making is the urgent need to open up a conversation not about the challenge to the impossibility of a theory (one) but the benefit of exploring the possibilities of theory (many). As Judith Butler aptly notes, "it may be time to entertain a radical critique that seeks to free feminist theory from the necessity of having to construct a single or abiding ground which is invariably contested by those identity positions or anti-identity positions that it invariably excludes." When Barbara Christian spoke up over a decade ago against the "race for theory," she brought up for scrutiny the link between identity positions and feminist theory by insisting that people of color have always theorized but differently: "I am inclined to say that our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in the riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking." At issue here is the personalization of theory formation in the West (Cartesian, for example) as opposed to the anonymity of a communal voice that articulates knowledge claims in African narrative forms and proverbs (which in Igboland are often preceded by "ndi banyi si/our people said"). As colonial subjects, one of the difficulties we encountered in our absorption into the colonial world of knowledge acquisition was our being required in the colonial schools to memorize and correctly identify the ubiquitous quotes and ensuing four-part questions that tortured us at examination time-who said, to whom, when, and where? (identify the voice that authorizes, the passivity that legitimates it, the temporality that marks it, and the location of the one-way traffic of a "transaction"). We forget such inanities at the peril of our educational advancement. No one bothered to ask us how we view knowledge, its formation and articulation; no one bothered to find out if we draw frames for knowledge (framework); no one cared to find out if our journey with and into knowledge is an ever-evolving, boundless love affair that sweeps us along with our neighbors, our ancestors, and those we have neither met nor "read" ("ndi banyi si/our people said" not "ndi banyi delu/our people wrote").

The location of African women (as knowledge producers and as subjects/objects for knowledge production) in feminist epistemological quarrels is both specific and complex. African women's critique of prevalent feminist theories goes beyond the issues of relevance, adequacy, and appropriateness to include crucial questions about representation and task-allocation/sharing. In their review of three edited volumes on gender and international human rights, J. Oloka-Onyango and Sylvia Tamale laud the volumes' attempts to incorporate diverse voices from the so-called third world in opposition to earlier international collections that at best marginalize and at worst silence "third-world" voices.

But a further probing of these three laudable volumes reveals their complicity (some are more culpable than the others) in the endemic pattern of quarantining "third-world" voices to specific sections that are marked by predetermined notions of the intellectual and epistemological boundaries of "third-world" knowing subjects. So-called international volumes usually exclude from the "theory section" the voices and presence of "third-world" women (absent as producers of knowledge and makers of theory but sometimes present to "rematerialize" or concretize the abstraction of theoretical positions). These publications tend to banish "third-world" women to case-study and country-specific sections, implying, of course, that these women can speak only to the issues pertaining to the specific countries from whence they come and do not have the capacity to dabble in the intricacies of theory as an intellectual, scientific abstraction that requires brain power to fashion and comprehend. Hidden in the inner workings of this assumption or reasoning are the unspoken issues of race and social location. Furthermore, this allocating of tasks to research subjects and their positioning as objects is colonial both in intent and execution. In the same way that Africa produced the raw materials that the metropole transformed into manufactured products, African women (as researchers/scholars and as the researched) are instrumentalized: as researchers/scholars they are the instruments for collecting the raw data with which foreign scholars manufacture knowledge; as the researched they are the instruments through which scholarship is produced and careers built. Often in genuinely collaborative work, Western researchers do not include Africans as collaborators or coauthors (at best, they are recognized and thanked as "informants").

The past couple of decades have seen the rise of African NGOs supported and financed primarily by foreign NGOs and international institutions and foundations. As Aili Mari Tripp notes in her study of new political activism in Africa, women's increased participation in civil society and governance is due to the intervention of "donors who have supported women's efforts to participate in civic education, constitutional and legislative reform, and leadership training, and have funded programs for female parliamentarians." However, NGO activities in Africa raise serious questions about information gathering and knowledge construction. With the impoverishment and collapse of the higher education system in many African countries and the increasing practice of foreign donors and NGOs to fund local NGOs (not individuals) for projects, there is an increased pressure on African academicians and scholars to form or join NGOs in order to receive funding for research projects. Aside from the usual (and legitimate) charge that research focus is often donor driven (witness the explosion of the number of African NGOs working on the hot-button issue of the nineteen nineties-so-called female genital mutilation), there are more worrisome questions regarding the nature, reporting, and archiving of "research" and the broader issue of accountability. The lack of reciprocity between Northern NGOs and their Southern counterparts is predicated on unequal relationships where the former demand transparency and accountability from the latter while maintaining secrecy and no accountability in return, a state of affairs that prompted Tandon Yash to caution Africans about being vigilant and demanding from their Northern partners an "alliance" (not one-sided "solidarity"):

The fact that western NGOs provide money for "development" gives them an easy access to African NGOs. Periodically, the western

NGOs demand that their "partners" open up their books and hearts to explain what they have been doing with "their money." This is called "evaluation." African NGOs have no such privileged access to the hearts and minds (and accounts) of the western NGOs from which they receive money. There is an unwritten law that says that where monies are spent they must be "accounted for," but where information is supplied (as African NGOs do to western NGOs) there need not be any accountability on how that information is used. The doctrine of financial accountability is legitimate; the doctrine of informational accountability is not.

This lopsided model of accountability has enormous implications on intellectual and epistemological levels. Often, the information gathered by Southern NGOs comes in the form of raw data crammed into reports whose aim is to show expenditures and justify the use of funds. In all this, little or no effort is made to encourage the Southern NGOs to transform their findings and data into an intellectual enterprise. Claiming total ownership of the findings and reports, the Northern NGOs (as funders) exercise the proprietary rights to use (even abuse) and dispose of the materials delivered to them while requiring the Southern NGOs (the producers of the data) to seek and obtain their permission before using the findings for other purposes. But how and by whom the data are used is of great significance. The restrictive NGO parameters notwithstanding, a small number of enterprising African NGO-affiliated academicians and scholars have succeeded in producing reports to satisfy funding conditionalities and at the same time use the findings imaginatively to produce knowledge that is disseminated through scholarly outlets-journals, edited volumes, and so forth. In order to participate fully in the shaping of knowledge about Africa, African NGOs should not hesitate to bite the finger that feeds them. Specifically, they should be prepared to challenge donor institutions and demand accountability and responsibility from them, when necessary, even as they seek financial support from them. The NGOs should walk the fine line between benefiting from corporations and being incorporated.

In their essay on the cultural imperialism and exclusions of feminist theory, María Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman also raise the question of accountability on the part of feminist theorists: "When we speak, write, and publish our theories, to whom do we think we are accountable? Are the concerns we have in being accountable to 'the profession' at odds with the concerns we have in being accountable to those about whom we theorize? Why and how do we think theorizing about others provides understanding of them?" Shouldn't Spelman and Lugones's concerns about accountability and ways of seeing/knowing be part of feminist theorizing? An African colleague once told me that African literature, because of its deconstructive and subversive nature and its position on subjectivity, voice, and representation, can only be conceptualized and theorized in the context of postmodernism: "Only postmodernist theory can tame and explain this five hundred pound gorilla," he opined with his inimitable laughter scattered all around me. My response was, if this gorilla is truly African, there must be some "gorilla-like" indigenous contexts and formulations that can lead us to a better and more understandable conceptualization and theorizing: "How about 'nmanwu theory' or even more specifically an 'atakata theory'?" I responded, collecting and redirecting my colleague's scattered laughter back to him. In Igboland (southeastern Nigeria), nmanwu (masquerade) and iti nmanwu (masquerading) are both spiritual and mundane. Nmanwu, in its indeterminacy (spirit in human form), walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but it ain't a duck. Nmanwu is a spirit that assumes a human form through an artistic expression that blurs the boundary between "high" and "low" art. Through its complex incorporation and weaving of prose, poetry, and "noise," the nmanwu crosses genre boundaries with facility. Its pastiche of a narrative runs counter to a grand narrative. Indeterminate and ambiguous in its conceptualization (spirit in human form), playful in its attitude, simultaneous in its enactment of different genres, deconstructive in its movements, multiperspectivist in its workings, this bricolage of an art form (nmanwu) arcs toward a "postmodernist" formulation (but let us not forget that masquerading in Igboland predates the emergence of postmodernism in the last century). The akataka, with its energy and agility, is the most disruptive, "fragmenting," and subversive of masquerades. In its conceptualization, construction, inner/outer workings, and appearance on the scene the akataka "deconstructs" and de-centers everything, sending subjectivities, multivocality, and representation flying in all possible directions. The Igbo say "adiro akwu ofuebe enene nmawu/one cannot stand at a spot to watch a masquerade"-a proverb that raises profoundly the issues of perspective and subjectivity.

While my colleague argues for using theoretical musings and abstractions of postmodernism to rematerialize or give form to African literature, I plead for "building on the indigenous" by arguing that, in effect, African worldviews and thought are capable of providing the theoretical rack on which to hang African literature. Can the akataka theory be more useful to the producers of African (Igbo, specifically) literature to understand and explain the literature to themselves and the rest of the world? Can postmodernism understand and explain itself to itself and to the rest of the world through akataka theory? Can institutional and disciplinary requirements, the politics of publishing, and professional survival allow the intrusion of akataka theory in the cross-fertilization of theory making? In short, why should a medley of voices not rise to formulate theory in the context of a cross-fertilization of ideas, concepts, and concerns? Culture (as a negative force) remains a central issue in colonial, developmental, and Western feminist discourses about the "other." Can the "other" culture be viewed otherwise? Are its concepts translatable to mainstream theorizing?