Intersectionality In African Feminism

With the developments of African feminism, which has been established to redress the issue of the exclusion of people of colour, non western cultures and particularly the narrative of black women in academic writing. Within the period of post colonialism, with the intention that this theory will offer a decolonial way of thinking, unlike relying on the colonial texts produced by cisgendered, heterosexual white men. This essay aims to define what African feminism is as a theory, through various authors’ understanding of what African feminism is and this will be done using the concept of intersectionality in order to illustrate my own, along with other authors’ understanding of African Feminism.

(Young, 2003: 3) argues that during the 19th century,

African identity in terms of the black woman had been rather ambiguous for a long time, as there were no written accounts of black women’s experiences of marginalization that were written by black women from Africa. Thus African feminism allows for African women to formally introduce themselves in social spaces that normally do not include them. For example through written accounts (Gqola, 2001: 18). An illustration of this is the female mapantsula, known as “abomshoza”, who are black women based within various townships in South Africa and they refuse to conform to the typical stereotypes of how a black woman is expected to behave, and so they are considered to be “dangerous”(Gqola, 2001: 19). Gqola argues that African feminism is about black women sharing their struggles of oppression and burdens that they face as being located on African land geographically. She metaphorically refers to this as “six mountains” on a black woman’s back (Gqola, 2001: 12). This is because the theory, also known as black feminism and womanism shares the unique experiences of black women on a daily basis (Gqola, 2001: 17). Through this, the power relations between the colonial authors and authors coming from states

For example, Gqola uses geographical location to define her understanding of African feminism, which I find useful, as according to the use of intersectionality, not many black women have the economic privilege to experience what feminism is like in a different location. Which is an advantage as feminism is not the same everywhere. Hence the need for African feminists to redefine feminism in relation to themselves. On the other hand, Lewis uses intersectionality to defined African feminism in relation to race, gender and class in terms of development. Here this conceptualisation is somewhat exclusionary as a significant number black women in Africa do not have access to resources that facilitate the production of development. Therefore, only black women, for example in urban areas and are in the middle income sector will be able to understand this interpretation at a more in depth lense than others. Lastly, Oyewumi uses the concept of African culture to understand what African feminism is and uses intersectionality as a tool to problematize African feminists who use eurocentric feminist theories to define African feminism, as firstly African culture is not as binary as western culture in terms of binary gendered roles and secondly, western theoretical concepts discriminate African culture for