Revolutionary Mothering

Abstract

́ Oyěwùmí, Obioma Nnaemeka, Nkiru Nzegwu and Filomina Chioma Steady have written important works arguing that motherhood needs to be understood beyond the dichotomy (oppressive institution or creative and generative activity) often presented in Western feminist writings. The work of these African scholars foregrounds precolonial knowledge to grapple with (post)colonial gender relations on the continent. Their theoretical, epistemic and methodological approaches demonstrate that these intellectuals were politically committed to problematising the sometimes condescending discourses of global sisterhood in which some Western feminists were invested. African feminist scholars were writing against a particular ideology of the 1970s and 1980s that singled out motherhood as an oppressive institution built by patriarchy. Their work interrogated those strands of radical feminism determined to “emancipate” women from motherhood through what Nnaemeka (1997, 5) called a philosophy of evacuation. They challenged the stereotypical view that African women are inevitably subjugated to men and their lives confined to mothering the children that they were forced to birth. Amadiume refutes this paradigm by asserting that motherhood is culturally recognised as an autonomous unit (2005, 93). Elsewhere, she argues that motherhood is sacred and imbued with spiritual and mythological might which gives women authority (Amadiume 1987; 1997). In an important intervention, Oyěwùmí (1997) contested the domestication narrative, citing the example of Nigerian women whose socio-economic realities did not make it possible for mothers to be domesticated. Instead, she argues that “part of the Yoruba definition of motherhood was that mothers must provide for their children materially” (Oyěwùmí 1997, 73). In a situation where women have to provide for their children, the narrative of domestication contradicts the fact that mothers must have the possibility to be involved in various activities such as trade (Oyěwùmí 1997, 97). Following the same line of argument, Steady discusses motherhood as a source of leadership with the capacity to birth the nation and to humanise the state (Steady 2011). In so doing, she sidelines the meta-narrative that reduces womanhood to victimhood by emphasising mothers’ socio-political, spiritual and economic engagement. Nzegwu (2004) has written on how motherhood has been deployed as a powerful instrument against threatening powers such as those coming from the state. In her more recent work, she refers to these powerful women as public mothers who confronted the state authorities that threatened to confiscate the women’s thriving market. The women’s resistance drew its