AFRICAN WOMANISM AS A RESPONSE TO SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR’S EXISTENTIAL FEMINISM

Abstract

Simone de Beauvoir’s Existential Feminism, the view that there is an oppositional logic in relationship between the genders, undermines African Womanism, which promotes a complementarity relationship between male and female. Previous studies have privileged essentialism, which portrays women across cultures as having the same attributes; and oppositionality, which conceives feminism in binary terms. This study was, therefore, designed to examine African Womanism and its complementarity principle with a view to establishing the relationship between gender differences, gender roles and social order in Africa.

Oyeronke Oyewumi’s notion of ‘gender differentiation’, which denies the existence of a universal gender social category that captures female experiences in all cultures, was adopted. Ten key texts in Existentialism, especially de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (TSS) and The Ethics of Ambiguity (TEA), Barret’s What is Existentialism? (WIE), Sartre’s Existentialism and Human Emotions (EHE) and Bhadra’s A Critical Survey of Phenomenology (ACSP); and ten in African Womanism, including Kolawole’s Womanism and African Consciousness (WAC), Amadiume’s Male Daughters, Female Husbands (MDFH), Okonjo-Ogunyemi’s Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English (WDCBFNE), Oyewumi’s The Invention of Women (TIW) and What Gender is Motherhood? (WGM) were purposively examined. These texts dealt with critical issues in feminism both from Euro-American and African perspectives. Texts were subjected to the philosophical tools of criticism, analysis and reconstruction.

The Euro-American feminist perspective, having emanated from a different sociocultural milieu, including de Beauvoir’s existential feminism, does not accurately represent the realities of African woman’s condition (MDFH, WDCBFNE). Texts in Existentialism reveal that the historically accepted differences between the sexes rest solely on social conditions which permit the subjugation of women by men (TSS, TEA). Women are made to see maleness as the natural human state in which they constitute the objectified other for men (WIE, ACSP). Biology, which emphasised differences in the sexes, was deployed as the basis for gender classification which privileges male over female (TSS, TEA). Texts in African Womanism show that the general belief about the human body as gendered, and the subsequent categorisation of both sexes on the basis of this assumption by many societies, rest on a misconception about a universal gender category (TIW, WGM). It underscores intragender variations spurred by intercultural difference. Biology was not the basis of social hierarchy in Africa as males and females were ranked more by chronological age differences than by anatomic distinctions.

The complementarity of roles by both sexes in Africa negated the issue of domination, and also enhanced societal harmony and development. The claim that role assignments along gender differentiation engendered male domination rests on a misconception about a universal gender category.