Numerous feminist ideologies were conceived in the west with a purported goal of liberating women globally. Decolonial scholars have questioned the association of feminists from the west with colonialism and the attendant privileges they secured from it. Skeptics of traditional feminism have questioned its Eurocentric presupposition to liberate women universally and now advocate decolonial feminism as an alternative due to the way it seeks to disentangle Africa, from the shackles of global capitalism, racism, and gendered relations. Africa today is beset with numerous challenges such as a growing young population which is unemployed, climate change, authoritarian political systems, and unequal trade relations between the Global North and the Global South. Europe has also taken advantage of its control over knowledge production to maintain a stranglehold on Africa. It is within this context that decolonial feminism, advocacy that Africa must fight for the emancipation of women, taking into account all the dominant forces of oppression holding the continent and its people backward.
Top1. Introduction
The emancipation of women has been an issue from the time of slavery in the United States to the post- colonial era in Africa. Feminism which is an umbrella term for all ideologies and frameworks which include Marxist feminism, radical feminism, liberal feminism, and colonial feminism among many others that seek the emancipation of women, has assumed various guises in the conceptualisation and theorization of reasons for women’s oppression and their corollary emancipation. The term feminism is complex and tends to defy a simple definition (Stuhlhofer, 2020). Hooks (2000, p1) opines that “feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression”. Another definition that echoes the same sentiments is submitted in the online Britannica by Brunell and Burkett (2023, p1) who postulate that feminism refers to “belief in the social, economic and equality of the sexes”. The same source acknowledged that the western origins of feminism and hastily added that it still has taken a global manifestation in the form of all organisations that seek to ensure that women are emancipated from all forms of oppression.
Oyewumi (2003, p1) observed the contested nature of feminism as a political movement as it is expressed in various terms such as “White feminism, Black feminism, Western Feminism, Third world feminism and African feminism”. The evolution of all these terms reflects the ideological struggles within the feminist movement as it seeks to secure the emancipation of women. The modern feminist movements have been characterized as waves that dominated feminist thinking, with the first wave starting in the 19th and 20th century in the United States and in Europe. The first wave was reflected by a liberal hue and was noted for the struggle to realise equal opportunities for women in education and the workplace. It is to this wave that the world owes much progress for women in the area of improvement in terms of access to education, jobs and health services and the right to vote. The wave emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in the post war western societies. It was a wave that was dominated by Marxist ideology and had in its ranks women of colour, third world women and people from different sexual orientations and was influential in the 1980s and 1990s. The third wave has been identified as starting from the mid-1990s, shaped by numerous diverse forces such as neoliberalism, post-colonial world order, post-socialist world and information society (Terborg-Penn, 1995). In this overview of feminist thought we cannot overlook the rise of African feminism. Terborg-Penn (1995) expounds that African feminism has its origins in the 1980s through the work Chioma who is an African in the diaspora. Chioma’s ancestors hailed from Sierra Leone, where they were trafficked to the Americas through the infamous slave trade. The same author developed an ideology on African women that could be applied to women in the diaspora and in Africa.
Chioma (2005) opines that African feminism is distinct from western feminism because of its humanistic trajectory, which acknowledges that power differentials can emerge not only based on a single axis like gender, but can be rooted on class, nationality, and other social categories. The thrust of African feminism transcends gender category to theorising about historical power differentials such as the slave trade, colonialism, racism, globalisation, and neoliberalism (Chioma, 2005). The ideology of decolonial feminism seeks to give voice to African women in areas such as economic, legal and political participation and it acknowledges that the global unequal power relations have had a pernicious effect on African men and women and continue to exert a negative hegemonic and destabilising effect on Africa. Associations that seek emancipation of women in Africa using the framework of African feminism seek to enhance women education, promote peace initiatives and, the provision of health care.