Words of Fire (89 page)

Similarly, Asante does little to take us beyond the positivism that he criticizes, and his schema assumes a universality as broad as the Eurocentric discourse he shuns. Moreover, the Afrocentric ideology he uses depends on an image of black people as having a culture that has little or nothing to do with white culture. This is one of its major contradictions. On the one hand, nationalists like Asante have to prove to African Americans that Afrocentric ways are different from and better than Euro-American ways. Nationalists try to convince black people that they should begin to live their lives by this Afrocentric ideology. For example, some nationalists argue that African Americans should turn away from materialism to focus on the spiritual needs of the black community. Yet on the other hand, Asante and others argue that black culture is already based on an Afrocentric worldview that distinguishes it from Euro-American culture. Rather than being an ideology that African Americans must turn to, Afrocentric thought becomes inherent in black culture, and black people already live by these ways in opposition to dominant culture.

I would argue instead that African American culture constantly interacts with dominant culture. Of course, black people do have their own ways not only because they protect themselves from penetration by white culture but also because they are creative. Nonetheless, blacks and whites all live together in the same society, and culture flows in both directions. Like the dominant culture, most African Americans believe that spirituality has a higher value than materialism at the same time that most of these people pursue material goals. If materialism were not considered crass by dominant society, Afrocentric critique would have little value. It is also important to note the extent to which white culture is influenced by African Americans. At an obvious level, we see black influence on white music with the most recent appearance of rap music on television and radio commercials. At a less obvious level, Afrocentric critiques compel hegemonic forces to work at covering the reality of racist relations. Far from being an ideology that has no relationship to Eurocentric thought, nationalist ideology is dialectically related to it.

What I find most disturbing about Asante's work is his decision to collapse differences among black people into a false unity that only a simplistic binary opposition would allow. The focus on similarities between
Africans and African Americans at the expense of recognizing historical differences can only lead to a crisis once differences are inevitably revealed. Moreover, his binary opposition cannot account for differences among Africans. Many eloquent African writers have warned us about the problems that came from accepting a false unity during the decolonization phase that has led to the transfer of local power from an expatriate elite to an indigenous one. Ngugi wa Thiongo, Sembene Ousmane, and Chinua Achebe would all warn us against such pitfalls.

And, of course, we cannot face sexism with this false unity, as Buchi Emecheta, Sembene Ousmane, and Mariama Bâ movingly show. Asante does tell us that along with the move beyond the Eurocentric idea, we can develop a post-male ideology as we unlock creative human potential.”
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Yet he has nothing more to say about gender in the entire book. It is hard to believe that this gesture toward black feminists needs to be taken seriously. It is to other Afrocentric thinkers that we must turn to understand more clearly what this discourse has to say about women.

Among the most important nationalists the
Journal of Black Studies
publishes is Ron Karenga, the founder of Us. Some readers will remember him for his leadership role among cultural nationalists in ideological battles against the Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s and for this pamphlet,
The Quotable Ron Karenga. In Black Awakening in Capitalist America,
Robert Allen quoted a critical excerpt from Karenga's book, exposing its position on women and influencing many young black women (including myself) to turn away from this nationalist position.
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Perhaps the key word in Karenga's early analysis of utopian gender relations is complementarity. In this theory, women should complement male roles and, therefore, share the responsibilities of nation building. Of course, in this formulation, complementary did not mean equal. Instead, men and women were to have separate tasks and unequal power. Indeed, in much of Africa today, women give more to men than they get in return in their complementary labor exchange. This is not to suggest that African women are only victims in their societies; nonetheless, sexism based on a complementary model severely limits the possibilities of many women's lives.

It is important to note that Karenga has reformed his position on women. Apparently, he used the time he spent in jail during the 1970s effectively by spending much of his time studying. It is from his jail cell that he published influential pieces in
Black Scholar and the Journal of Black Studies.
He began to articulate more clearly a critique of hegemonic culture, showing the impact of reading Lukacs, Gramsci, Cabral, and Touré. And though he does not say so explicitly, he begins to respond to black feminist critics of his work. Indeed, I find the change in his position on women impressive. Although he remains mired in heterosexist assumptions and never
acknowledges his change of heart, he drops his explicit arguments supporting the subordination of women. The new Ron Karenga argues for equality in the heterosexual pair despite his continued hostility to feminists.
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Unfortunately, too few nationalists have made this transition with him. Male roles remain defined by conventional, antifeminist notions that fail to address the realities of black life. For example, articles in Nathan and Julia Hare's journal,
Black Male/Female Relationships,
consistently articulate such roles. Charlyn A. Harper-Bolton begins her contribution, “A Reconceptualization of the African American Woman” by examining “traditional African philosophy, the nature of the traditional African woman, and the African American slave woman.”
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She uses African tradition as her starting point because she assumes an essential connection between the African past and African American present:

She leaves unproblematic the African legacy to African Americans as she presents an ahistorical model of African belief systems that ignores the conflict and struggle over meaning so basic to the making of history. This model assumes a harmonious spirituality versus conflicting materialism dichotomy that grounds the work of Asante and her major sources, John Mbiti and Wade Nobles.
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It is a peculiarly Eurocentric approach that accepts conflict and competing interests in a Western context but not in an African one. Harper-Bolton never moves beyond the mistaken notion that Africans lived simply and harmoniously until the evil Europeans upset their happy life. Ironically, as I have been arguing, such an image of Africans living in static isolation from historical dynamics supports racist ideals and practices and conveniently overlooks the power dynamics that existed in precolonial Africa like anywhere else in the world. In addition, her model portrays African women as a monolithic and undifferentiated category with no competing interests, values, and conflicts. The power of older women over younger women that characterizes so many African cultures becomes idealized as a vision of the elders' wisdom in decision making. It accepts the view of age relations presented by more powerful older women whose hidden agenda often is to socialize girls into docile daughters and daughters-in-law.

When Harper-Bolton turns to the legacy of slave women for contemporary life she owes a large, but unacknowledged, debt to the social science literature on African survivals in African American culture. In particular, her work depends on the literature that explores the African roots of African American family patterns. Writers such as Gutman, Blassingame, and Kullikoff have attempted to build off Melville J. Herskovits's early
work on African survivals. This literature has been crucial for forming our understanding of black women's roles during slavery with particular reference to the African roots of these roles.

Unfortunately, this literature also shares certain problems that have clouded our understanding of this African heritage. What concerns me most are the sources that these historians use to compare African and African American slave families. Two major sources have been used uncritically that are particularly problematic when studying African women's roles in the precolonial era. First, historians have relied on precolonial travellers' accounts written by Westerners exploring the African continent. These accounts are important sources to turn to—and I have used them myself. But they must be used with great care because it is precisely at the point of describing African women and gender relations that these accounts are most problematic. Often these travellers' debates over whether or not African women were beasts of burden and whether or not African women were sexually loose spoke to debates in Europe. Rosalind Coward has explored the obsession of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Westerners with gender relations around the world, assuming as they did that these relations were a measure of civilization.
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Needless to say, these travellers brought the sexist visions of their own society to bear on African gender relations, and, therefore, their writings must be used carefully.

But I am more troubled by the second major source used by historians looking for African legacies, that is, anthropological reports written between the 1930s and 1950s. My interest here is not in being a part of “anthropology bashing”—accusing it of being the most racist of the Western disciplines. (Historians, after all, did not believe that Africa even had a history; they rarely turned their attention to its study until the 1960s.) But the use of anthropological accounts in the study of African history is very troubling to me. Used uncritically, as they most often are, these accounts lead historians into the trap that assumes a static African culture. Anthropology can give us hints about the past; but given the dynamic cultures that I assume Africa had in the past, these hints must be treated carefully.

Moreover, there is a particular problem in the use of these accounts for understanding African women's history. Most of the reports relied on were written in the mid-twentieth century, a time when anthropologists and the colonial rulers for whom they worked were seeking to uncover “traditional” African social relations. They were responding to what they saw as a breakdown in these relations, leaving the African colonies more unruly and, most importantly, more unproductive than they hoped. Young men and young women ran off from the rural areas to towns, escaping the control of their elders. Divorce soared in many areas. The elders, too, were concerned with what they saw as a breakdown in their societies. Both
elders and colonial rulers worried that young people made marriages without their elders' approval and then, finding that they had chosen partners with whom they were no longer compatible, the uncontrollable youth divorced without approval and made new, short-term marriages.

The anthropologists set out to find out what led to this “breakdown” and to discover the customary rules that they felt had restricted conflict in “traditional” Africa. Once again we see the concept of a harmonious Africa before colonial rule emerging. In his introduction to the seminal collection,
African Systems of Kinship and Marriage,
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown expressed this concern.

In part, Radcliffe-Brown and his coeditor, Daryll Forde, offered this set of essays as a guideline to colonial administrators so that the colonialists could counteract the destabilizing influences of Westernization. Such anthropologists obviously felt the need for a better understanding of people under colonial rule.

Not surprisingly, it was the male elders whom the anthropologists asked about these customary laws, not the junior women and men who now divorced at an increased rate. Martin Chanock points out in “Making Customary Law: Men, Women, and Courts in Colonial Northern Rhodesia” that customary law was developed out of this alliance between the colonial rulers and the elders' interests. Of course, African elders were unequal partners in this alliance. Yet since both elders and colonial rulers viewed the increasing rates of divorce and adultery as signs of moral decline, they collaborated to develop customary laws that controlled marriages. “For this purpose claims about custom were particularly well-suited as they provided the crucial and necessary legitimation for the control of sexual behavior.”
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Chanock shows the way customary laws in Northern Rhodesia represented increased concern with punishing women to keep them in control. Therefore, in many cases such as adultery, what got institutionalized as “tradition” or “custom” was more restrictive for women than in the past.

It is with this concern of maintaining male control over women and elders' control over their juniors that many anthropologists of the 1940s and 1950s explored “traditional” African culture. To read their sources into the past could lead us to very conservative notions of what African gender
relations were about. Yet Harper-Bolton accepts these views uncritically when she presents as unproblematic a model of gender relations that fails to question women's allocation to a domestic life that merely complements male roles.
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And, by extension, she buys into an antifeminist ideology. She warns that rejection of African tradition leads women into two directions that are antithetical to healthy developments in African American family life. In one direction, women can fall into loose sexual behavior by accepting Euro-American conceptions of woman and beauty. In the other direction, women become trapped in aggressiveness in the work place and rejection of motherhood. Harper-Bolton argues: