Regarding Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí's What Gender is Motherhood ?

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 about Yorùbá life mistranslate contemporary gender parameters into their work and interpret all anatomically female characters as women and, or, mothers, contrary to the different sex and gender patterns indicated in the illustrative textual narratives that accompany divination. 

According to Oyěwùmí, existing scholarship proceeds as if canonical palm-nut divination is exclusively ordered for and by male-being, and as if the system renders inferior the divination methods that are more prevalent among non-male practitioners. After all, predominant scholarship goes, the ideal Yorùbá diviner is a babaláwo (“father” of esoteric knowing). Oyěwùmí’s painstaking analysis of divination objects, illustrative texts that accompany divination consults, and the sociological milieu, demonstrates that by overlooking significant elements of the divination apparatus and semiotic constructs, contemporary scholarship casually—and wrongly—attributes the production of traditional high knowledge to “father”hood.

The male primogeniture discourse of culture that is presumed in dominant Yorùbá divination scholarship, Oyěwùmí further argues, has infected other disciplines like Art History (men work in “hard” substances like bronze; women with “soft” materials like clay), Religion and Spirituality (malevolent forces typically present themselves as women, and male, benevolent, healers keep them in check), and Politics (the Ìyálóde office was created to address women’s issues exclusively). To overturn these misreadings, Oyěwùmí locates and interviews female diviners and offers new readings of existing collections of divination stories. 

In the alternative that she proposes, Oyěwùmí argues that offices and practices believed to have been instituted for the exclusive purpose of addressing women’s concerns do not, within the society’s intellectual self-conception, make epistemological sense. For example, the office of the Ìyálóde, the archetype of women’s political clout in pre-colonial times, is a mid-19^th century creation, Oyěwùmí argues. It is not insignificant, she further stresses, that this particular era in Yorùbá social history--one witty newspaper columnist referred to it as the Yorùbá mfecane--witnessed great disruptions catalyzed by changes midwifed by Christianity and gradually escalating colonial relations. Within a full understanding of Yorùbá social structures, the “mother” (ìyá) in the title of that office could not have meant that the office holder led only “women” and “mothers” only in public spheres because motherhood, in the social order that was being overthrown, was far richer as a social concept than modernizing literality imagines. (I could say more. Sorry. My readers will have to go get the book.)

To my mind, the historical contextualization that drives analysis in What Gender is Motherhood? serves a crucial prequel to Invention of Women and should make critics of the earlier book a little less unhappy, although Oyěwùmí still refuses to cede to traditionalists the control of how “tradition” is to be understood. She continues to maintain that gender was not an ontological category in dominant Yorùbá discursive fields prior to the introduction of material and social production systems inflected through European influences. For evidence, she started with a heavy reliance on Yorùbá metalanguage of kinship terms and later expanded that emic approach to include concrete historical practices. (Hint: savor the naming practices chapter.)

Oyěwùmí’s critique demonstrates persistently that seniority is the main operator of hierarchy, inequality, and privilege in deep Yorùbá thinking about social interactions. What scholarship ought to account for is how seniority becomes the exclusive preserve of the masculine, and maleness gets naturalized as the unassailable sign of the prior, and the superior. (Quoting the proverbial lore that says the father is the one that gets to the camp first [ẹni a bá lábà ni baba] does not prove universal Yorùbá phallocracy.) 

Open minded readers should be happy that Oyěwùmí’s work renders male privilege inauthentically African.