The interrogative in the title of Professor Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s last book, What Gender is Motherhood? Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity (Palgrage 2016) , is an unanswerable, rhetorical, question ( ẹ̀ràn ) that is meant to challenge the belief that motherhood defines woman-being universally. (In southwestern Nigeria, discerning people do not speak in such tropes to the unwise [ a kìí ran ẹni tí ò gbọ́n , is the formulaic expression]). Oyěwùmí argues that social life—kinship organization, for example—in parts of southwestern Nigeria decouples motherhood from sex, and she criticizes the methods by which social science accounts of Yorùbá communities impoverish second order reflections on the organization and regulation of life as they are embedded in oral and traditional institutions of knowing. For example, philosophers and literary critics that represent divination texts as sources of governing statements...