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THEOLOGIAN MERCY AMBA ODUYOYE CLEARS SPACE FOR THE VOICE OF AFRICAN WOMEN.
Two things are true about Mercy Amba Oduyoye: She is one of Africa's premier Christian theologians, and she is one of Africa's most underrated Christian theologians. Both truths hang together.
Oduyoye is underrecognized in the world of religious studies, especially Christian theology, because of the focus of her work: African women. For more than 60 years, through her theological and advocacy work and her ecumenical involvement, Oduyoye has centered the experiences of these women, cementingtheirvoices within the canon of Christian theology and ethics. "Christianity as manifested in the Western churches in Africa does little to challenge sexism, whether in church or society," Oduyoye writes in Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy. "I believe that the experience of women in the church in Africa contradicts the Christian claim to promote the worth (equal value) of every person. Rather, it shows how Christianity reinforces the cultural conditioning of compliance and submission and leads to the depersonalization of women."
African women, much like their African American womanist counterparts, have resisted narratives of women's experience put forth by white Western women or African men. White women, they explain, cannot speak for African women. And African men cannot speak for African women. Oduyoye recognized early in her career that African womenmust carve out space to narrate their own lives and theological ideas. African women "take a critical distance" from "European and American theologies of various types, including missionary and feminist/womanist theologies," Oduyoye explains in her 2001 book Introducing African Women's Theology, "as their priority is to communicate African women's own understanding" African women can speak for themselves; Oduyoye gained this wisdom and courage from her upbringing
'THE ADVANTAGES OF KEEPING WOMEN INVISIBLE'
Mercy Amba Oduyoye is the eldestof nine children of Charles Kwaw Yamoah and Mercy Yaa Dakwaa Yamoah. Oduyoye was born in October 1933 on their family's cocoa farm in southeast Ghana; Oduyoye's love of chocolate today seems a fitting tribute to her birth.
Her parents were members of the Akan ethnic group; Oduyoye's Akan name, Ewudziwa, is a tribute to her maternal grandfather. The Akan are a major people group; in the early 17th century, there were 33 independent Akan states, located mainly in...