Content area
Full Text
What Gender is Motherhood? Changing Yoruba Ideals of Power, Procreation and Identity in the Age of Modernity. By Oyèrónké Oyewùmí. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. xi + 262. $100.00, hardback (ISBN 9781137538772).
In her 2016 book, What Gender is Motherhood? Oyèrónké Oyewùmí develops further the very important argument she put forward in her 1997 monograph, The Invention of Women, Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. In brief, the central argument is that ‘gender’ as generally perceived today – in terms of a man/woman gender hierarchy of male domination/female subordination – is not as universal as is widely believed. Colonialism imposed this manner of conceptualizing gender on the Yoruba, as well as on many other colonized populations, in Africa and elsewhere. By contrast, precolonial Yoruba society was gender neutral: gender played no particular role in social organization, what mattered were hierarchies of seniority and of lineage.
In her new book, Oyewùmí reiterates and elaborates this argument, giving convincing examples from her reading of Yoruba bodies of knowledge, such as the Ifá system of divination. She develops her thinking in two directions. First, she traces the role of Yoruba intellectuals and scholars in obscuring this precolonial gender system. Early Yoruba intellectuals were all trained in mission schools, where Christianity in combination with English language learning produced a gendered reading of Yoruba history, mythology, and social institutions. Yoruba language is ungendered, as a general rule, individual names are also not gendered, and kinship terminology expresses relations not of gender, but of seniority and generation (older/younger sibling;...