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Engendering African social sciences, ed. by Ayesha Imam, Amina Mama, and Fatou Sow
At the Pan-African Anthropological Association meeting held at the University of South Africa, Pretoria in November 1996, I asked a professor of anthropology from the University of Nairobi, Kenya why he had omitted analyzing gender as a contributing factor to the construction and meaning of ethnicity in a paper he had presented. He dismissed my inquiry, insisting that he was dealing with the concept of ethnicity that had nothing to do with gender. Gender, he argued, was something that everybody was rushing to use because it was "fashionable."
It is one thing to disregard an analytical tool on the grounds of fashion and another to deny its importance in understanding social phenomena. This trivialization of gender as an integral part of social science scholarship forms the heart of this excellent volume of fifteen essays entitled Engendering African Social Sciences. As Ayesha Imam poignantly articulates in the introductory essay to this volume, "the gendered discourses that women and men inhabit and make their own take their distinctiveness from the relationship of difference and contrast set up between them." In this way we are able to see that the creation and perpetuation of knowledge in African social sciences is not neutral and representative of the society as a whole, but rather is centered around ideological and political paradigms that are mostly masculine and contextual. By engaging gender as an analytical tool for social science research in Africa, scholars are not only able to dismantle previous male-biased paradigms of knowledge production but are also able to introduce into social science scholarship a more inclusive and critical rendition of social reality.
Many of the contributors to this volume build their essays on the conviction of how much of social science knowledge in Africa has been generated with no attention to gender and the little, if any, attention given the politics of the production of knowledge. In doing this...