Africa After Gender?

4. Dialoguing Women

4 Dialoguing Women Nwando Achebe and Bridget Teboh What does it mean to be an African and female? What are the highlights, the joys, and the tribulations of conducting research on our own people?1 How do we see and interpret the African world around us as well as the stories that have been entrusted to us? Who owns African knowledge and, most important, how have we as African gender historians navigated our various research environments ? On Being African Nwando Achebe When I think of my identity, a number of questions immediately come to mind. First, what does it means to be African? Second, what does Africa (and especially Nigeria) mean to me? And third, how do I choose to locate and name myself?2 The issue of how I choose to name myself informs my very identity. I am ¤rst and foremost Igbo, then I am a woman, and third I am African. Only last do I name myself Nigerian. Being black does not even enter into the equation , since race has never been a distinguishing category in Africa.3 We are simply people, nations of different ethnicities, language groups, and cultures. Therefore, Igbo is who I am, it is my culture, it is my worldview, it is the way I think, the way I speak, the way I write, and the way I dream. But a big part of my Igbo identity is also shaped by being a woman. For an Igbo woman’s world is vastly different from an Igbo man’s—her mannerisms,the way she carries herself , the expectations society has of her and she of herself, the way in which she is socialized—all make her uniquely female. Being African, on the other hand, represents my connectedness with all African peoples, my rejection of the colonial boundaries that divide us, my embracing of the various sisterhoods and brotherhoods that I ¤nd so African and so very appealing (hence my conviction that even though my colleague Bridget Teboh is from Cameroon, she is truly my sister). This African identity of mine is certainly more pronounced than my Nigerian identity—a feeling that is reinforced every day as a somewhat displaced person who has lived most of her life in the United States.4 Nigeria holds a sweet yet oftentimes bitter place in my heart. Nigerian nationalism for me has thus evolved into an acquired taste—something like the bittersweet taste of an udala fruit—initially overwhelming your taste buds with a sweetness as pure as honey and then just as quickly slapping you with a bitterness that extends almost to the pit of your stomach. My relationship with Nigeria has been much like that udala fruit. As many times as Nigeria has made me proud, she has just as surely made me want to dig the ground and bury myself in shame. But I have also come to appreciate something else—that each time I overcome that incredible shock to my senses, that lingering assault in my mouth occasioned by a second bite into the juicy ®esh of the udala fruit— the lasting taste in my mouth is almost always much sweeter than it is bitter. Through thick and thin, Nigeria has remained a country that I identify with and one that has most surely shaped my identity—the who and what I am. So why are these re®ections important? Certainly because my relationship with Africa and Nigeria and the fact that I am Igbo shapes in a profound way what I am willing to do or not do when it comes to research. It shapes, rightly or wrongly, how I identify with my research collaborators—a fact that has a direct effect on what I choose to write about and my interpretation of data—as well as my notions of accountability. And as an Igbo woman conducting research on Igbo women and gender, I feel accountable to my research collaborators because not only do I identify myself with Igboland, my home community, I also recognize that no matter what, I will return home! Bridget Teboh When I think of my Africanness as an identity, several questions come up. For example, what is Africa? Is it merely a geographic location or also a construct of varying images and impressions and contested meanings? What does it mean to be African? What does Africa mean to me? Who am I, and how do I position myself within this construct? Since the late 1880s, when those arbitrary...