Decolonial African feminist thought is equal parts rage and radical care. It is a collaborative and unbiased call to action that insists on justice, self-determination, and autonomy, building on the legacies of foremothers to create our lifelines for our future and the ones that come after us.
In the past year, the concept of ‘decolonization’ has faced strong pushback from the intersection of Big Tech, political interests, and conservative ideologies, reaching such proportions that Elon Musk, X’s CEO, described decolonization as ‘unacceptable to any reasonable person’, equating it with extreme violence and a violation of X’s terms of service. This reductionist rhetoric, particularly orchestrated to undermine campaigns against Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the designation of Palestinians as killable, disposable bodies, portrays decolonization as genocidal hate speech. In this essay, I reflect on the critical significance of the de-colonial from my concrete experiences as an African woman of Yorùbá descent who did a brief stint of grassroots activism towards political education, women’s research and documentation, and anti-sexual violence before moving to the US to pursue graduate education at the intersection of gender and sexuality studies and digital humanities. Here, my encounter with canonical American studies texts like John Locke’s theories of social contract came with a realization that Global North modernity was built on this basis: an agreement between rational individuals, transitioning from a state of nature into a collective body, where the right to punish is ceded to the state.
Here, I must add that these thoughts I share here are collaborative speaking to/with foremothers, living and passed, and whose labour established the possibilities for counter-hegemonic feminisms and pockets of resistance to advance the stakes of an African feminist decolonial thought. My approach and thought specifically draw on the core areas that have driven my work and the directions of my political thought since I discovered the possibilities of a decolonial world sense. The very basic conception of decolonial feminism is built on a radical care approach to self-production and self-exploration—how we make sense of ourselves, and our relationship to our ancestors, land, and people. Nigerian gender scholar, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s work on Yorùbá knowledge systems insists that the modernity we have inherited is a product of history and culture, where the collision of time and space determined whose knowledge was imposed and whose knowledge was erased. The implication of this is that our modernity is hinged on coloniality that persists even after the physical signifiers of colonialism are long gone. Exploring the historical processes behind colonization and white universalizing epistemologies, Jamaican writer and cultural theorist, Sylvia Wynter, reveals the central imperatives behind the invention of man, that determine which bodies are acknowledged as human with boundless possibilities for social, creative and epistemic exchanges. On the one hand, the basis of a God-given right to occupy and punish irrational godless individuals was the charge driving the logic of settler colonialism across indigenous lands from Abya Yala to continental Africa. However, when the incoherence of a rational/irrational binary became obvious, especially in the face of indigenous resistance, a state-led ‘degodding’ emerged that split the church and the state into two entities, even though religion remained a significant instrument for the institution of colonialism.
The final invention of man, Wynter contends, was motivated by a colonial difference big bang event that produced a system of signification that essentially meant the further down the brown spectrum you are, the less human you were. And so, to be human was to be white, to be brown was to be subhuman, and to be Black was to be animal—the very basis of the ideologies that drove the transatlantic slave trade and persist in the Global North framing of continental Africa till date. What emerged from this construction was the erasure and epistemic disregard of existing truths of African as well as other Black and Brown bodies and mythology of dread at anything remotely African. Therefore, the outcome of over 500 years of trans-Atlantic slavery, colonization, and ongoing coloniality is that we have been compelled and socialized into privileging Euro-American truths, and what we have as a result is a climate-deficient, hyper-individualistic world without empathy.
When putting these in context, it underscores that the very attack on the word ‘decolonization’ is reinforcing subhuman imaginaries and binding our bodies into ideological containment that is eerily similar to slave ships. Yet I am not lost on the irony that a white South African is one of the most intentionally algorithmically prominent voices in the battle against decolonization. My discussion in this article begins by exploring what a decolonial approach to gender and sexuality can look like in a world prioritizing singular truths, and finally, I explore a decolonial feminist approach to the digital and the very real effects of what Cognitive scientist and AI accountability activist, Abeba Birhane, amongst others have referred to as practices of today’s tech giants that mirror historical colonial exploitation of territories and resources.
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí offers a central argument in response to contemporary gender revolutions—Africans do not need to invent anything. Centring her deductions on the evidence within Oyo-Yorùbá that point to an inherent deference to seniority rather than gender and matrifocal namings of self and others ( ọmọ-ìyá), Oyěwùmí argues for a need to turn to African cultural epistemologies as extant truths that break Euro-American feminist epistemologies. Essentially, Western feminist thought deeply centres on a rigid, universal idea of gender as the dominant system of classification based on sexual differences, and the meanings and roles assigned to one and the other. With Oyo-Yorùbá culture, Oyěwùmí draws on the evidence in the language and the structure of social organizing to make the overarching statement: ‘Yorùbá don’t do gender.’ In primary school, we were often taught that the nuclear family is the smallest and most basic unit of the family. The nuclear family is that enclosed structure from which our understanding of political and moral agency is distilled: The man (the leader), the woman/wife/mother (the subjugated embodiment of reproductive and domestic labour, whom Oyěwùmí argues cannot be read independently of these mutually constituted labels), the children (boy and girl who grow up into a structure of gender sameness where the boy becomes the man and the girl becomes either the reproduced woman/wife/mother or becomes dissatisfied and agitated with this structure).
Oyěwùmí’s central argument is that the feminist figure that emerges from the dissatisfaction cannot see beyond the family as the ‘everything’ of her oppression, and because of that, she cannot see race or class as these exist beyond the realms of this structure. Therefore, the hyper-nuclear Eurocentric foundations of Western feminist thought alongside white colonizer logic disregard structures of many African societies, including what she describes as fluid, situationally-contingent relations that have little to do with human bodies or sexual differences; where a biological woman can be ọkọ to an in-marrying biological woman or a biological man can be ìyàwó to his deity, and where everyone’s pronouns are inherently non-binary: ‘òun’, ‘wọn’, ‘iwọ’ etc. I find Oyěwùmí’s arguments very subversive, especially for the alternative imagining that they offer us to dismantle the deeply rooted Eurocentric points of view and the NGO-developmental narratives claiming to transform Africa’s gender regression.
Yet I would argue that while some geographies of genderlessness or more appropriately gender fluidity are evident in the very convincing instances that Oyěwùmí centres, in conversation with Nigerian anthropologist, Ifi Amadiume and Ghanaian academic, Kwesi Yankah, there was nonetheless an overarching phallus signification, in the Jacques Lacanian sense. The concept of a body with a phallus was a privileged signifier that stabilized discourse within a Yorùbá context where the body without the phallus was perceived as not whole—the only marginally stabilizing factors for women being class and seniority. In the specific context of my paternal family in Esa-Oke, in-marrying wives were called ‘eru‘, meaning slaves, lending insights into traditions of rigid patriarchal dominance After years of silencing and within the tensions and limits of wifehood, oral traditions passed through generations of wives reveal that a kitchen performance called eré obìnrin-ilé began that gradually refuted the subject-object relations of the Faniyi men and their wives, beginning a hundred years ago and continuing till date. Using music and performance as channels of economic empowerment, radical care, and joy, they refused to negotiate their presence but insisted on it and dictated how they were remembered. To be part of that legacy of women refusing ‘subhumaness’ makes me proud beyond measure, and makes me recall the quote, ‘If they tell you, you are too feminist, show them who your mothers were.’ Othering at the level of language inevitably leads to othering at a deeper emotional level, and while Yorùbás might not do gender insofar as situationally contingent references and non-gendered pronouns, Yorùbá did gender in its positioning ọkọ as superior to ìyàwó, where even female ọkọ is superior to female ìyàwó, and reinforced the idea of woman as lacking or incomplete compared to man. What made Yorùbá the hyper-gendered culture and language it is today is expressed in Oyěwùmí’s arguments: coloniality. The imposition of Victorian patriarchy in a system where women nonetheless found visible spaces to create alternative conceptions of self despite the privilege and authority assigned to men, meant that these alternative geographies were catastrophically disrupted. Men were assigned apical privilege even though they were read as animals, thus effectively removing African women from the political category of humanness and womanhood. It is at this intersection that African feminist and literary scholar, Molara Ogundipe, would theorize the mountains inhibiting women in Africa as colonial oppression, traditional/cultural oppression, backwardness, men, colour/race, and herself. On the notion of sexuality, she tacitly wrote: ‘Africa does not know its sexuality.’
I have always deeply connected to the conceptualization of queerness in the Cathy Cohenian way of one’s relation to the state and by extension colonial power. Therefore, I question what is rendered discreet, in the contemporary NGO brokerage that portrays Africa as a feminized and queer hell as opposed to the West as its heaven. I find in this the persistence of colonial language and tactics, reminiscent of colonial voyage writers like Gordon Sinclair, who caricatured a Sàngó priest as a ‘self-styled imp’ saying ‘mumbo jumbo’ to keep thunderstorms away, while dressed like a woman. These narratives have evolved to paint Africa as inherently backward and rigid, while positioning the West as the arbiter of gender fluidity and linguistic diversity which we now must audition to fit into, effectively erasing these expressions that existed long before colonial encounters. Therefore, if we submit that to be Yorùbá (and a Yorùbá woman) is to already be queer, if we were to submit Amadiume’s evidence of female husbands and male daughters and the institution of woman marriage in Igboland, it might not be farfetched to claim that to be African is to already be queer, especially considering not just our cultural epistemologies but the historical processes that have removed us from Eurocentric political classification, rendering us to the wild, which in the Taussig sense is the place where signification fails to exist.
However, in crafting our identities out of this void, we were confronted by multiple tools of epistemic violence: ethnography and anthropology, Christian colonization, laws, prisons, and guns. While there were nonetheless pockets of direct resistance against the totalizing force of coloniality, the modernity that we have inherited is colonial mastery in our relationship to our land, bodies, hair, language, history, and culture. The overarching question thus becomes: if the entirety of our modernity is deeply entangled not just in the political and economic but also in social, ontological, and cosmological coloniality, then for whom is this modernity?
We can argue that the same gender saviourism in NGO and developmental narratives finds its parallel in the language of bridging the digital divide and tech saviourism ventures of the Global North. Big Tech giants are materially and ideologically transforming us into quantified beings—economic objects bound to territories across colour and geographic lines, reinforced by practices that exploit people’s data for corporate profit just like historical (and ongoing) colonial exploitation of territories and resources. The overarching logic is that data has become the new oil, coffee, cocoa, and other exploited resources, and our lives online have become their highly valued product. Abeba Birhane and her collaborators’ work in progress has in particular argued that the major undersea cables in Africa owned by Google and Meta physically follow the trans-Atlantic slave trade route!
French feminist, Francoise Verges, had asked a pivotal question: who cleans the world? In the context of data, we see the real-time effects of how labour exploitation disguised as tech saviourism affects African workers who are paid less than $2 per day to perform unseen and thankless tasks of data labelling, cleaning the filth off the datasets used to train chat programmes like ChatGPT. As Birhane argues, these companies profit off poverty and the rhetoric of lifting Africa out of poverty—one real-time evidence of the disposability of African workers was recently seen with the sudden layoffs at the onset of Twitter’s leadership change. In February 2024, OpenAI launched its Sora text-to-video model, and a very disturbing, flattened, and soulless Lagos, an output of Sora, was shared virally. As we are continually pushed into adopting the misnomer of artificial intelligence and the binary of AI vs human, we must remember that many of those who ‘cleaned it’, for poor pay and little to no emotional support, were Africans! Even after the illusion of the physical removal of colonizers, the parallels of colonialism and contemporary data extraction and exploitation continue to perpetuate global inequalities, just as the racist, sexist, colonial results of AI generative models that render invisible our truths are akin to the oil spills and environmental degradation currently plaguing the Niger Delta—another ongoing legacy of coloniality.
DECOLONIZING OURSELVES
As coloniality contains and regulates our lives, binding us to its walls and rendering discreet our potentially liberating alternatives, a decolonial thinking understands that even as colonial logic writes us as disposable, we are integral for its sustenance. Our (internalized) sub-humanness sustains the hierarchies because you need the concept of sub-humanness for there to be humanness, therefore the very premise of totalizing coloniality/modernity is shaky. It does not exist, and it ‘exists’ in relation to the absence of African, Indigenous, Caribbean and Asian truths. Therefore, a radical awakening or what Afro-Dominican decolonial feminist theorist, Yuderkys Espinosa-Muñosa, describes eloquently as epistemic disobedience, creates problems for this totalizing logic, as it emphasizes that the premise of coloniality/modernity is erasure and silencing.
There is a matter-of-factness to the modernity of post-colonial peoples from our cyber-selves to architectural designs, food taste, beauty, literature, Afrobeats, Nollywood, FinTech and more. Yet our lives and language are almost irreversibly tainted by Euro-Americanness in our modern global-facing Nigerianness. We have multiple generations of Nigerians who are raised with English as their first language. We have adhered to colonial ways of classifying and interpreting our ontological system. We are also desperately chasing the models of a singular modernity that has been prescribed by the Global North, in terms of democracy, infrastructure, education, agriculture, land extraction, and security, and failing exceptionally at it. Decolonization, however, is not a word to be taken lightly; it is the radical possibility to imagine alternative ways of world-making, that allow our very deeply hidden truths to leak into our present and future. A radical possibility that allows us to stop writing our ability to be a thriving nation into the colonial past.
A decolonial feminist approach is hope and strategies for resistance all in one: a theory for everything, that insists on interpreting the world not through an adapted white gaze but with our cultural knowledge and epistemologies at the centre while acknowledging the flaws embedded within our pre-colonial past. However, despite this impureness, we must find pockets of resistance and cling to them. We would find them, as Oyěwùmí found in Ifá and in several of our systems of knowledge that have persisted due to unknowability, untranslatability, and the inability of coloniality to transform them. Decolonial feminism is further premised on collective thinking, even when devoid of material bodies in contact with each other, as this very article is centred on thinking with Black, Indigenous, and African feminist counter-hegemonic scholarship. Yet we must refuse an approach where the South is constantly speaking to the North, while the North exists in its bubble. I recall a story famous among Nigerian gender academics where foremothers like Bolanle Awe and Molara Ogundipe walked out of a conference in the US that epistemically sidelined African feminist scholarship and set up a press conference that called out the organizers explicitly. That, too, is the driving force of African feminist decolonial thought: walking out on spaces that say we do not have anything of value to contribute. It is calling out the impasse of an androcentric feminist gaze that is ‘barbiefied’, airbrushed, and sung over a catchy chorus. It is inherently being what Sara Ahmed describes as a Feminist Killjoy, those who refuse the aesthetics of colonial modernity, and who refuse the basis upon which postcolonial democracy is built and call out the incoherence of democracy with the carceral imaginaries for queer bodies. It is listening and amplifying the voices of the African women who put themselves on the line, doing the arduous labour of AI auditing; women such as Deb Raji, Abeba Birhane and Joy Buolamwini. It is also acknowledging the possibilities that come from responsible AI and African model of technology, such the machine-learning model that diagnoses early stages of cassava plant disease directly on farmers’ phones, developed by Kenyan researcher, Charity Wuyan and her team.
Ultimately, our major imperative must be centring our own interpretation of our world. Who truly finds AI input-process-output and prompt engineering new? Additionally, as Caribbean scholar and professor, Aisha Finch, asked, for whom is queerness or transness new? Certainly not for Ifá priests, whose divination mathematically calculates the right odù to address a client’s inquiry, drawing from a wealth of generative odù-ifá that is not reliant on data exploitation. In the same way, queerness is not new for the Yorùbá or the Igbo, nor for Black diasporic peoples whose experiences of the middle passage, and their forceful removal from categories of humanness led to alternative imaginings of relation to the body and normativity. Decolonial African feminist thinking thus prompts us to question supposed prescriptive statements when the production of its knowledge is stripped from certain bodies and centres only on a specific type of white body. It connects us to a critical legacy that binds contemporary Black women to their ancestors who not only resisted slavery but created breaches of resistance within alien spaces of domination, and whose legacies continues to sustain the spiritual and material connections between Afro-diasporic people today. A decolonial feminist thought is equal parts rage and radical care. It is a collaborative and unbiased call to action that insists on justice, self-determination, and autonomy, building on the legacies of foremothers to create our lifelines for our future and the ones that come after us. Ultimately, decolonial feminist thought is understanding that our future will not be a utopian world, but one where our interpretations are our own, and our tools of worldmaking are even more rooted across diasporic lands and seas and more sophisticated and cohesive, in refusing coloniality and its systems of domination.
