Once again, we are at a juncture where there are tremendous and rapid agitations all over the world for rights and social justice, and the questioning of democracy itself. There are raised hopes and a hunger for a new direction in the global configuration, with much emphasis on the exploitative nature of big corporations, the consequential weaknesses and failures in hegemonic financial and economic systems.
The powerful links between big private companies, big finance, and government have resulted in widespread global concerns about increasing corruption, authoritarianism, regression, ineffectiveness, and the failures of patriarchal and reactionary dictatorial tendencies of male-dominated leaderships at the top. These destabilizing processes lead to a search for theories and ideas of sociocultural alternatives for a better world.
Increasing environmental awareness points to the search for answers in people-centered alternatives, particularly from a non-Eurocentric perspective. In African Possibilities: A Matriarchitarian Perspective for Social Justice, I focus on the exploration and exposition of possibilities that advance gender partnership and people power-sharing to move beyond the present antagonisms and impasse in gender discourse—thus, to look at an alternative, inclusive, and different compassionate society. Gender still matters both in improving personal and social relations and on the question of power in relation to society, the nation, and the state.
Globally, there still exists extreme underrepresentation of gender, resulting in demand for the closing of gender gaps toward equality, inclusion, and social justice. The essays in African Possibilities are based on a theoretical framework that argues African women’s notions of gender inclusiveness teach us that we can shift from an exploitative patriarchal capitalist model of exclusion, marginalization, and violence to a new planetary consciousness of a matriarchitarian inclusive cosmos that celebrates sustainable nurturance, peace, compassion, knowledge, social justice, and progress. Such gender and people inclusiveness promotes social equality and power-sharing, and these are necessary for achieving inclusive and equitable development and a better future for all.
My previous book Male Daughters, Female Husbands is mainly about gender and powersharing, and examines really practical ways and institutions to express and practice gender social justice. This work leads me to argue that the flexibility of gender in the language of kinship and descent becomes the model for government administration in the traditional society. I extend this theory and argue that through the flexible gender concept of a male daughter, a man or woman can head the descent group. This flexible gender bending can easily be translated into a woman head of state in our modern society with its rigid attachment to a male leadership and a patriarchal notion of power. The persistent stubborn presence of patriarchal politics means that the realization of having a woman at the top of the political ladder still eludes many contemporary nations.
The modern gender gap is a global problem that shows that the majority of women are left at the very bottom of the economic and political ladder. Social and economic issues of rights also take on cultural and conceptual expressions. Through the flexibility of gender that generates the concepts of a male daughter and a female husband, women can easily occupy top economic, business, and social positions at every level of society. It is a conceptual shift in gender thinking for the better of all. These two matriarchitarian concepts of female gender leadership presence in both the family and the head of state link together the economic and the political in a realistic political economy of equal gender social justice. This is an excellent and creative use of metaphor, imagery, and symbolism for a progressive society, something that I argue literature does best: liberalizing and opening up culture and society. In this regard, I emphasize the importance of interdisciplinarity as a necessary tool with rich perspectives that can be used to examine complex and interrelated topics toward a better understanding of the complexity of topics and issues involved.
The theoretical framework of matriarchitarianism that I apply in Male Daughters, Female Husbands stems from years of the accumulation of theoretical thinking and analysis from my previous works and research on matriarchy in Africa. It is not particularly in response to other perspectives on the subject, but about staking a position, as this framework of matriarchitarianism gives matriarchy relevance, seriousness, applicability, and space for contestation on major issues of today. It pushes the question of gender beyond biology, arguing for inclusion, gender representation, and power to engage in discourse from a matriarchitarian perspective in every subject and topic. Thus, there has been a steady development in my approach to matriarchy from arguing the presence of an African matriarchal foundation in history and social institutions in order to establish the visibility and contributions of women in African societies. It is also to acknowledge in a useful and applicable way women’s contributions, achievements, and legacies in our heritage. When women are visible in important institutions in the social structure, one is challenged to advance the analysis of gender to understand all aspects of society and the constituting social structures. This analytical process enables one to deconstruct the dominant notions and theories of patriarchy to reveal a matriarchal presence also in culture and philosophy, and therefore the possibility for matriarchitarianism in movement as the spice of progress. The matriarchal presence is the holistic healing herb in the garden of struggle, agitation, and movement in the processes involved in the drive for progress.
In the social anthropological method and analysis used in Male Daughters, Female Husbands, just as the flexibility of gender in the language of kinship and descent aids the equality of gender practice in economic and political aspiration and pursuit, I argue that the matricentric unit in the African kinship system is a basic economic production unit that also generates a culture of matriarchy. Kinship groups can be seen as biological and non-biological social relationships forged through blood, marriage, common ancestry, and adoption. Also, the values and language of family and kinship are reflected in cultural and political systems. Women are therefore disadvantaged by the patriarchal bias in anthropological classification of African kinship systems and terms of reference that often marginalize and render invisible equally important women’s institutions, systems, terms of reference, multiple roles, and relationships in the household, family, and kinship.
The dominance of a patriarchal bias in the study of kinship has resulted in the use of patrifocal terms and concepts that fail to express the multiple roles, cultures, and relationships of women as mothers and mother’s daughter and mothers as sister and women as daughters and mentors and friends. This patriarchal bias dominates the terms of reference in matters of citizenship, property, and residential options, when the reality in a matricentric unit is different and holistically more collectivist and gender inclusive (in the unity of the matricentric household). Thus, the inclusiveness of the matricentric unit generates what I call a relational (connectedness) matriarchal model with a relational matriarchal principle. I apply these terms to the theory of matriarchy based on a paradigm derived from the gender-inclusive and collectivist matricentric unit in African kinship systems and its production unit, thus linking economic production to sociocultural and philosophical values; this can also be described as a political economy of gender.
A matricentric household unit with an economic, cultural, and matriarchal ideology in which equal gender practice is idealized in matriarchal values of love and compassion is a better model for progress, rather than the partial one of a patrifocal generational gender inequality encoded in patrimonial patriarchy. Matriarchy generates an equal gender practice of gender flexibility, thus extending inclusiveness, as in the flexible kinship ideas illustrated in the book, such as a mother’s brother being the same as the mother and called a male mother. A father’s sister shares patriarchal authority and is called a female father, a woman takes the place of a son and is called a male daughter. Similarly, a woman taking the place of a husband is called a female husband, and daughters’ children have a relationship of love, indulgence, and compassion with their mother’s lineage. These are good examples of creative matriarchitization for progress. I also show the continuing contemporary twenty-first-century interests in Igbo women’s legacies of same-sex marriage practice and the formidable Igbo women female husbands of the nineteeth and twentieth centuries. Flexible gender values derived from African traditional notions of family can better capture the idea and ideal of a shared humanity toward an inclusive identity and citizenship, since family in all its varieties is part of kinship and descent, and even clan and nation.
It is important to emphasize these matriarchal values as a cultural, philosophical, and ethical means to a progressive forward movement seeking to correct and overturn regressive and suppressive tendencies. Culture continues to matter in very fundamental ways, hence the importance of applying the dialectic and dynamism of kinship to social justice, democratization, and struggle.
The text of this blog post has been extracted from pages 1-7 of African Possibilities: A Matriarchitarian Perspective for Social Justice and edited to appear here with the author’s permission. Read the unedited excerpt here.
Ifi Amadiume is an award-winning poet and political activist, as well as an academic and editor of African Possibilities. She has lived in Nigeria and the UK and is currently Professor at Dartmouth College, USA, where she teaches in both the Department of Religion and the African-American Studies Programme. Her influential book Male Daughters, Female Husbands (Zed Books, 1988) won the Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year award in 1989.
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