A Claim Designed to Unsettle a Basic Assumption
The Nigerian sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi's 1997 book The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses opens with a claim deliberately built to challenge something readers might assume requires no argument at all: that the category "woman," as commonly understood in Western social and feminist theory, a biologically defined social category carrying specific, largely fixed social expectations and subordinate status, simply did not exist as an organizing social category in precolonial Yoruba society. Oyewumi does not argue that biological sex differences were unrecognized or that Yoruba society had no social hierarchy whatsoever; she argues specifically that anatomical sex was not the principle organizing that hierarchy, a considerably more precise and more radical claim than a simple assertion of precolonial gender equality.
Seniority, Not Gender, as the Organizing Principle
Oyewumi's central alternative claim is that precolonial Yoruba society organized itself hierarchically around seniority, meaning relative chronological age and the specific, relational position a person occupied within a given social interaction, rather than around a fixed, biologically determined gender category applying consistently across every social context. She illustrates this argument through concrete linguistic evidence: Yoruba kinship terms, she argues, did not denote gender the way English kinship terms typically do, and social roles including oba (ruler), babalawo (diviner-priest, the same role examined in this course's first unit on Ifa), and market trader were, in her analysis, available to anafemales (Oyewumi's own coined term for anatomical females, chosen specifically to avoid importing Western gender assumptions into her own analytical vocabulary) without any inherent contradiction the way a rigid gender-based hierarchy would typically produce.
A Historical Turning Point: The Atlantic Slave Trade, Not Only Later Colonization
Oyewumi's argument carries a specific historical claim connecting directly to this course's earliest units: she argues that the shift from Yoruba society's age-based social structure toward a Western-style gender-based hierarchy began not only with the later nineteenth-century "New Imperialism" and formal European colonization examined throughout this course's companion African History curriculum, but considerably earlier, with the Atlantic slave trade itself, which she argues began introducing colonial-era social disruption and new hierarchical categories well before formal colonial administration arrived. This claim positions Oyewumi's specific argument as directly relevant to essentially every earlier unit in this course examining the transatlantic slave trade's broader social consequences, not merely a claim about later formal colonial rule alone.
What This Argument Does for Contemporary African Feminism
Oyewumi's broader philosophical and political point is that Western feminist theory, built around categories and assumptions, including the primacy of biological sex as the fundamental basis for social hierarchy, developed specifically from European historical experience, cannot simply be applied wholesale to African societies without seriously distorting how those societies actually functioned, before and often after colonization. For Oyewumi, the "woman question" that has organized so much Western feminist theory is, in her own phrase, "a Western one," not a universal, neutral analytical lens automatically applicable everywhere, a methodological argument with implications extending well beyond gender theory specifically into the broader question this course has examined throughout regarding which analytical frameworks, whether Western academic philosophy's standards for what counts as legitimate argument, or Western feminism's core categories, can be applied to African societies without distortion.
