Stakeholders both in the academia and socio-cultural spaces have joined numerous others in celebrating African women who were described as premier creators of communities and networks.
This observation was part of the many others made at the last Toyin Falola Interview Series held on Sunday and streamed on various social media platforms, television and online radio platforms.
The panel which consisted of very distinguished female academics and cultural experts noted that the contributions of women in various spheres of human evolution have been underplayed, just as they noted that the creative essence of women as creators of communities and networks should be celebrated.
Speaking at the interaction with the theme: ‘Celebrating African Women’s Research, Knowledge Production and Activism within Africa and in the Diaspora’ were prominent women scholars such as Professor Ousseina Alidou, who moderated the event; Professor Marame Gueye, a scholar-activist at the East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina; Professor Fatima Sadiqi from University of Fez, Morocco; Professor Simone A. J. Alexander from Seton Hall University; Dr. Zeinabou Hadari, a scholar and feminist from Niger; Professor Lidwien Kapteijns from Wellesley College; Professor Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed from the University of Georgia; and Professor Lilian Atanga, a non-Resident Research Fellow at the University of Free State in South Africa.
In her intervention, Professor Gueye stated that women have always remained knowledge producers. “African women are the premier creators of communities and networks. These include financial networks, family networks, relationships, kinships and many others. In the diaspora, especially in America, we find ourselves pretty isolated when it comes to this community. In 2017 what I did in my intention to really connect was to look at the daily life of Senegalese women, especially in the diaspora and how I can move from the academia to the daily lives of women. I created this network of women on social media; this is a very rich platform where we have conversations around, not only our lives as immigrants but also to our connections with home and how that home affects our daily lives, and also how we can as immigrants contribute positively to creating change especially when it comes to gender empowerment and women liberation. To that effect, I am also part of several feminist networks in Senegal. I write a lot about notions of gender, and particularly when it comes to decoloniality with gender, it is always imbued with coloniality. The question that I ask is how is it that in our relationships to women, especially with African women, and we talk about returning to African ways, this always puts women at subordinate positions. How does this differ from the colonial way of looking at women? I think these are really important questions to look at and language is a site to look at these notions of decoloniality that is also colonial,” she said.
In her assessment of the essence of African women, Professor Sadiqi revealed that “I am a linguist and my mother tongue is Amazigh; and for me the Amazigh language and culture is one link between North Africa and the rest of Africa, and I have experienced this first hand. This is because the first part of my work was about Amazigh language and culture. What I see is that Amazigh women are presented in most cases as preservers of culture. At the same time when you look at the language and you reflect on the fact that this is a language whose alphabets have not been used for texts and yet the language survived. It took me years to find out that it survived because it is linked to women’s design in carpet-weaving and rug-weaving. This intervention is a tribute to the weavers, anonymous women. To try to prove what I said, I had to go back to pre-history when North Africa was very much part of the Great Sahara. The fascinating thing is that the designs and art of the women were very much similar to some of the rock inscriptions that were recognized very long time ago. One of the areas of study which really helped to unearth this was archaeology. Archaeological work in Morocco after independence and nowadays has shown that the interpretation and findings reveal that the shape of the Amazigh alphabets which I compared to the shapes of the designs that the women wove, a long time ago are similar. The message I want to pass on is a simple one. Women through art, their creativity, imagination, designs and symbolisms, express a lot that, even after the coming of Islam these things are part of our unconscious and art. Through their creativity, women actually helped codify the language which is why the Amazigh language has survived.”
Also speaking Professor Kapteijns informed that “We have been asked to talk about our own work with regards to the knowledge production of African women. In my case that is very much the knowledge production of African women of the past in their own works, languages and also in their role in the creation, preservation and dissemination of this past knowledge production. One of my major books was Women’s voices in a Man’s World. It presented and analyzed Somali texts of three kinds: first were late 19th and 20th century texts that had been collected and published by colonial linguists and ethnographers from which I asked what they could tell us about women’s agency and this turned out actually to be a lot because women talked back even indirectly in these texts. They also gave ample evidence about women’s resistance against patriarchal rules. These were colonially-mediated texts. I think old texts are mediated and complex but the colonially collected ones were particularly mediated. The second kind of texts in that book was about women’s work songs and religious songs. The third kind of texts was about Somali popular songs of the 1950s to 1970s that dealt very explicitly with gender issues and were sung by women who informally co-created by them.”