African Women Culture

Art: Beauty Of Africa

(1) Sandra Aguebor- Ekperuoh, Robert Kokoma, a native of Benin city, Edo state. The First Lady Mechanic in Nigeria (Sandra Aguebor) was born in the 70s into the family of late Mr. &Mrs. R.A Aguebor. She attended Ivbiotor Primary School, St Maria Goretti Grammar School in Benin, later to Benin Technical College for further technical skills and finally a graduate from Auchi Polytechnic, all in Edo state. She also had a degree from The GOETHE INSTITUTE, a German school based in Lagos State. Currently Sandra is acquiring a part time degree course in Mechanical Engineering. This young Lady Sandra is also the CEO/MD of Sandex Car Care, (specialist in maintenance, servicing of mostly used cars and sales of spare parts for commonly used cars), she maintains and services fleet of cars for MTN Communications, KAKAWA Discount house, Transocean, Alandick, Zenith Bank, Ikoyi Club, CNN News, BCC News, Games Shopping Complex, AIICO Insurance, WHO, United Nations and lots of notable individuals.

(http://www.edoworld.net/Sandra_Aguebor.html) and (http://www.voicesofedowomen.org/sandra_aguebor.html)

(2) Stella Obasanjo was from Iruekpen, Esan West, Edo State. Stella Abebe obtained her BSc at the University of Ife in English 1967 to 1969. In 1969 she was transferred to the UK to complete her studies, this time round, in insurance, in London and Edinburgh, Scotland, from

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You may wish to read this early European characterization of the people of Benin City. The Dutch geographer Dapper wrote of the people of Benin as follows:

"The king every year 'goes twice out of his court and visits the town, at which times he shows all his power and magnificence and all the bravery he can, and then is conveyed and accompanied by all his wives which are about 600 in number, but they are not all his wedded wives."

"These negroes are much more civilized than others on this coast. They are people who have good laws and a well-organized police; who live on good terms with the Dutch and other foreigners who come to trade among them, and showed them a thousand marks of friendship. Deceiving and drunkenness are not their principal faults but rather lechery."

Dapper, Description of Africa, Amsterdam 1686 quoted in Schwartz (1968) Nigeria. London: Praeger Publishers page 67.

Prince Eweka, There is a problem. The problem is prostitution. Not just prostitution but the selling of our young girls into international prostitution by people who should be protecting them. Ascribing the origins of the prostitution in Edo land to another ethnic group is a cop out. Most societies in Nigeria were not monetized and could therefore not have a word describing "sex-for-money". But they had words for promiscuity, for women who slept around.

It is possible that there were prostitutes from Nsukka. I am sure that coal mining activities must be one of the explanations for the emergence of sex-for-money in that part of the world.

There is no profit in relapsing into a defensive crouch. Rather, what we should do is to call attention to this scourge and campaign for policies to stem the trade in flesh.
okn
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OKN:
You know very well that I seldom respond to mails which miss the essential point in my original postings. You missed the point and I thought over it before attempting to respond to you. I never said that women or men do not sleep around. I gave a name. I called them FLIRTS. Did you really read my posting thoroughly or you are just pulling my legs again as I tried to run back to my shelf?

Thanks for the quote from the Dutch geographer Dapper. But I hope you are not alluding to the last line of the quote:- " but they are not all his wedded wives? " If that is what you are alluding to, well, I have this to say: “Ehen OKN, you have a problem. You need to study a little bit of Edo culture with specific reference to how the Obas of Benin get married to so many women." No free 100 course on Edo culture this time Okn.

Besides I can still remember that you were bestowed Edo citizenship a long time ago by me. You were close to being made achief . Do you want me to cross out your name? Do not forget that you can become the Iyase of Benin someday if you behave well. Bolaji Aluko is still in the running INSPITE OF IT ALL. He is an Edo man no matter how hard he runs away from it.. There is no way that I too can also deny my own YORUBA HERITAGE. Even a rat has two families-the father and the mother.
Greetings
Ademola Iyi-Eweka.
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Prince Iyi-Iweka:
Here is the point I tried to make. The Dutch thought Bini people were lecherous. I reproduce the quote:

"These negroes are much more civilized than others on this coast. They are people who have good laws and a well-organized police; who live on good terms with the Dutch and other foreigners who come to trade among them, and showed them a thousand marks of friendship. Deceiving and drunkenness are not their principal faults but rather lechery."

The dictionary explains lechery as "unrestrained and promiscuous sexuality." The Dutch described the Edo as lecherous.
   
Nigeria: Car Line
I do not believe that you are not uncomfortable with such a characterization of the Edo. If that is so, you should not make the assertion that the presence of women allegedly from Nsukka explains the monetization of sexual intercourse in Edo land. By the way, what is the Edo attitude towards sex? A recreational activity? A sacred activity? A solely procreative activity? What is the Edo attitude towards a woman's body? As a temple? An object of play and fun and enjoyment? It is by asking and answering some of these uncomfortable questions that we can begin to seriously tackle the social problem of prostitution.
From me to you,
Best wishes.
okn .
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Dear OKN,

What the Whiteman described as lechery was nothing but POLIGAMY. OKN, you are smart enough to have known that the Edos are a polyginous ( poligamous) society. The Oba had over 600 wives and some were not his “wedded wives." Your friend saw a train of women and he was told they were the Oba's wives. But he did not tell you, how the Oba came to be marrying about 600 wives or why those who were not his “wedded wives" got there. When you know how the Obas of Benin got wives then and now, then you would have discovered that your friend used a wrong term to describe what he saw in Benin hundreds of years ago.. It seems you need some clarification or lessons about Edos way of life. Dapper's 600 wives/polygamy and lechery are joined at the hip. Dapper was using his Judeo/Christian values of Europe of his day, to describe what he saw in Benin-POLIGAMY. I will oblige you this time only.

When an Oba of Benin is on the move, the royal court is on the move. As he moves from one community to another, gifts of various kinds including human beings are given to him as pages or slaves (when slavery was practiced) These of course included women. Parents give out their daughters as a would-be wife to the king. These women are handed over to the chiefs who are in charge of the Oba’s harem. The train of human beings grows larger and larger as the Oba moves around. These chiefs actually go out on a recruiting drive to procure wives for the Obas of Benin since the Obas do not leave the palace grounds.

Many of these women never go to bed with the King or even see his bed chamber until he passes to great beyond. Many of these women, the Obas may never see face to face are put in POOL, to be given out as wives to loyal chiefs, loyal palace servants, military generals, princes and newly installed ENIGIES/OBIS/OVIES. To make sure that these women were not defiled, EUNUCHS were placed in charge of this pool of women. How on earth could the Oba so described have had sexual relationship with all these “600 wives "? According to the British, Oba Ovonramwen had about 80 wives when Benin City fell in 1897. Tell the Whiteman to keep counting.

OKN, you owe me a lot of money for this course 101 on Edo culture and Tradition. I can understand your problem about Dapper's quote, since you grew up in the Eastern part of Nigeria, which had no tradition of kingship. That is why I want you back to Benin City as a chief. That is the only way you will understand why the Edos do things the way they do it.
Greetings.

Ademola Iyi Eweka.
Compile By William Edia

Gender in current parlance signifies the power relation between masculine and feminine. The gender ideology presupposes that the masculine encompasses the female, or takes priority in relation to the female and is entitled to expect subordination and submissiveness and self-abasement of the female. The gender ideology is not limited to biology. It is also social and appears in relations among men as among women and among nations. It functions, as a pecking order colonies were females in relations to the colonizing nations. Men slaves are females in relations to women in the master's household. White women are gendered males in relation to black women, a realization that was among the reasons for a specific women's theology in the USA named womanist by black women of the USA. Let me illustrate this with a story.

The Circle planned a Pan-African Conference for its members in 1996. When word got out, several non-Circle members asked if they could come. The answer was, "no" for the Circle was created to enable African women to say their own word. We had worked in a process over seven years and were meeting to decide on what the future should be. We did not need spectators.

A British woman wrote asked whether she could come and deliver a paper on the conference, which was "Transforming Power - African Women in Religion and Culture", I, as the organizer of the conference wrote to say she could not come, as it was not an open forum. I arrived at Methodist Guesthouse in Nairobi to find her already installed and with a chalkboard at the front desk welcoming the Circle members. It is a nasty story. She imposed herself on the meeting, interviewed the women, collected their papers, ignored all my protests and out of the meeting got what she needed to get her PhD thesis completed and also published. She is gendered masculine, with power to act, the Circle is gendered female, to be used or ignored.

I confronted her with the disrespect she had shown in ignoring the fact that she was told she was not welcome. She had assumed being British that a Ghanaian woman is a colonial subject who should work to raise funds to bring African women together to facilitate her research. She had the power of money on her side; she could get to Nairobi without a ticket from conference funds. She could pay for her stay of the Methodist Guesthouse, there were other guests there but they did not get crash our conference. She was white and many were the black people conditioned to give in to the whims of white people. She had power and I was powerless to prevent her from doing what she had planned to do. She was gendered male and I was gendered female in this instance. She is entitled to my labour and does not have to listen to me or respect my feelings and views. Such is the phenomenon of gender that we are looking at. Though gender refers to hierarchy associated with roles based on biological sex, it transcends it. In this paper however it is gender as male superiority, patriarchy, androcentrism and kyriocentrism. This offering is about the hegemony of men and androcentrism in African theology. Gender relates to the patriarchal phenomenon that structures relationships in hierarchies and pyramids.

When women's voices were heard on how women experienced life, words like sexism, sexist, patriarchy, androcentric, misogyny, feminist, feminism, androcracy on the tongues of women begun to jar men's ears and to make "the good women nervous". As women began to narrate and to substantiate how language, tradition, culture, religion, legal codes, household arrangements stifle their humanity, the word began to go round "women are their own worst enemies".

"Women are their own worst enemies"
They say so, who want to stay so.
"It is women who vote for men"
Why so? No one asks.
Never were people taught that women could lead.
Often were women taught that they were not capable.
When the eye of the mind saw that only men led,
The brain dictated "Vote for men only"
To walk the way of the past
Is it not self-hatred?
Open the eye of the mind.
Self-preservation so dictates
The worst enemies of women are those who say
"Women are their own worst enemies"
They say so who want to stay so.

It is women who put pepper into other women's eyes".
Why so? No one asks.
Never were people taught that
Women are also simply human.
When the eye of the mind sees that 'human' reads 'men'.
The brain dictates, "Creativity belongs to men only".
To walk the way of the past is not self-hatred,
To walk the way of past is to
Keep up a false sense of security for all.
To hold on to the past.
Is to imprison imagination.
"Women are their own worst enemies".
They say so who want to stay so.

So
Stop the say Sos
Stop the enemies of women.
See!
The New is in the AIR.
Catch it!

Feminism was named an American white middle class phenomenon but is showed is itself as broader than that and feminist were described as all who honour the humanity of women and include women's agency in human endeavours.

As the analysis of phenomenon of women's quest for liberation developed, it became clear that religion was one of the main sources of the denigration and marginalization of women from the exercise of power and of autonomy. Stanton's women's Bible resurfaced and the cry went up among churches that women are rewriting the Bible. Women from other faith communities re-read their scriptures and commented in writing. On the Christian theological scene. Mary Daly's, The Church and the Second Sex shook the ramparts of church and theology. She followed it with Beyond God the Father in which she argued that if God is made then the male must be God and since this has to be resisted, the male language about God has to go. My response was, God is male does not make the human male God. Maybe it comes out of my orientation toward non-gender specific pronouns and the Creator God as a woman in some parts of Africa.

Many more women wrote, Caucasian, Christian, Jewish and Moslem. Soon there was the generic name Feminist Theology, later to be diversified with the rise of Womanist and Mujerista Theologies. Asian women produced their theologies and so did African women and Latin American women. First this was done in the mode of a general theology of liberation within the Ecumenical Association of Theologians until the Association too proved to be non-gender sensitive. Women realized that if they do not say, "we are here" the men will continue to act if women were absent.

In Africa gender became a theological issue when the Circle asserted that the gender parameter in African culture and African religions have crucial effects on women's lives and on how womanhood is viewed by Africans. They researched the names given to baby boys and baby girls, rites related to the birth of boys and that of girls and all other rites of passage. They examined everyday language and especially proverbs, myths and legends and found them seeped in a gender ideology.

They examined daily relationships in marriage, inheritance laws and women's leadership and roles in the wider society as in the church. Gender as the power, priority and preference of biological male over the biological female was evident everywhere. The women pointed out that it is not only biblical hermeneutics that needed attention but most immediately cultural hermeneutics as Africans are in crisis about their relationships to the inherent ways of doing and thinking. Especially when it is in conflict with modernization and against the notion that culture is dynamic and an open circuit. Gender in biblical studies took the form of re-reading, and the hermeneutics of suspicion and resistance prevailed.

The feminist highlighting of the maleness of God took back seat but African women still saw through the power that men derived by associating masculinity with God. It was necessary to exhibit the feminine face of God and to distance God from the violence against women that has become endemic in man-woman relations in Africa. God had to be placed beyond gender. Contrary to what Daly says, Oduyoye insists "God is male does not make the male God" no human being has a right to play God in another's life except as agent of love, compassion justice and empowerment as demanded by God. Gender is a human, social construct and should not be made to apply to God. Men must not continue to co-opt God into this hierarchy of being by reading into the scripture an order of male over female as ordained by God. African women took refuge in the existence in versions of African Traditional Religion in which the creator is imaged as a woman.

The gendered nature of theology is exhibited not only in the male image of God but in the doctrine concerning the nature of the human being traditionally designated as "the doctrine of man" in English. Women have to sing "Stand up O men of God". Here too African languages assuaged the fears of women that they have become invisible as most African languages have words that mean humanity and no-gender specific pronouns. This however did not prevent the church from being operated as a gendered Institution with men as owners and women as the clients.

The Church's order and liturgy came under scrutiny and the issue of participation as in the Pauline theology of koinonia was lifted up by women. In the Bible study that convoked African women theologians in 1989 Teresa Okure comments on the healing of Jairus daughter as follows "Today, we are not to be satisfied simply with being healed. We are to join the discipled in being healers, proclaiming, the reign of God has come, that we have touched that reign, become part of it, and have been empowered by God to become its heralds (Oduyoye & Kanyoro 1990).

Musimbi Kanyoro the first co-ordinator of the Circle writing on "God calls to Ministry: An Inclusive Hospitably" used the Theological constructs of Koinonia, our common baptism and the Pentecost experience. (Kanyoro & Njoroge 1996). The two articles (Okure & Musimbi) were selected by Sr. Mary John Mananzan as presenting what African women theologians say on the subject of "To be fully human". The Circle followed Accra with studies on the reign of God and out of efforts in West Africa. Elizabeth Amoah edited the Circle book Where God Reigns.

In Talitha qumi (1990) one finds the gender constraint evident and critiqued in all the contributions. The introductory article "The search for a two-winged theology" sets the agenda and the tone of participated. Power is to be jointly utilized according to charisma and not directed by biological determinism. The Bible studies in this book demonstrate the need to pay attention to context and to culture as well as the need to become sensitive to gender when dealing with religion and culture and by extension to theological construction. The papers and the poems all highlight the role of gender in theology as traditionally curbing women's initiative. The women give indicators of how to find scriptural resources to resist this dehumanization of women.

Seven years later the Circle met in Nairobi as mentioned above. One of the books that came out of the papers delivered is Talitha Cum! Theologies of African Women edited by Naymbura J. Njoroge and Musa W. Dube (Cluster 2001), Again "Little Girl, Get Up" was used as introduction and Njoroge in the Preface writes "Together we will soil our hands in our efforts to achieve the goal of dignity, liberation and fullness of life in Africa". 

Nyambura highlights in addition to Talitha Cum! "Eph'phatha" "Be opened (Mark 7:31-35). Silence is no longer an option where women theologians are concerned. Women's 'silence' was not voiceless their lives spoke volumes but now their voices are heard and as Nyambura says "they are calling churches to listen and engage in conversation with African women. (It is interesting to note that neither Nyambura nor Dube were at Accra. Though the former was at Ibadan, they represent the widening of the Circle and study increase of women with doctorates in the theological field in its membership). Theology in Africa calls for acknowledging the role of gender in theology and for eliminating its debilitating effects so that the church might be the church. Between Talitha (1990) and Talitha (2001) several researches have highlighted issues of gendered theological reflections have been written on them, hospitality, violence, HIV/AIDS, spirituality of resistance and transformation and a deepening of the hermeneutics of culture as well as biblical hermeneutics. That women are absent from the pages of our tunes on the history of Christianity is evident. This denial of women's agency has to be corrected and a beginning has been made in Her Stories.

Unravelling the gender component of Christian theology began with studies of life situations and of 'story' telling it was, if you like a phenomenological approach. Lately the analyzing and theolozing from the stories have led to tentative steps towards theorizing an example is what Musimbi describe as "engendered communal theology". The dilemma posed by culture and religion, structures that are both positive and negative in their utilization of gender is an open field for study. Discussing "Gender as a concept in theological analysis" Musimbi has this to say, "Theological engagement with gender issues seeks to expose harm and injustices that are in society and are extended to scripture and the teachings and practices of church culture".

Gender in theology faces the web of oppression as noted above and is not limited to power relations between women and men. She highlights women's emphasis on anthropology with special reference to the establishment of the full humanity of women. Gender in theology critiques the dualistic thinking that opposes body to soul material to spiritual and assigns whatever in the pair is deemed inferior to be feminine. In African women's theology, theological analysis is linked to cultural hermeneutics. A concept that has come from the identification by African women of gender as operating in both culture and theology.