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Journal of Women's History 12.4 (2001) 174-183



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Contemporary Issues

Age, Gender, and Knowledge Revolutions in Africa and the United States

Claire C. Robertson


In this essay, I suggest that Africa and the United States have experienced, and are still experiencing, two revolutions in knowledge systems. By knowledge systems I mean epistemology, content and definitions of knowledge, ways of learning, and tools for learning. Here I will look primarily at ways of learning and tools for learning, but it is also important to keep in mind the revolutionary potential of the other aspects of knowledge systems. These revolutions have had drastic implications for women and the elderly. In both cases, gender has seemed on the surface to be a less important factor than age, but in effect gender has been critical to both revolutions. Here I will consider the effects of the imposition of Western-style formal education 1 on Africans and of the increasing requirements of computer literacy on Americans, especially regarding the structure of employment and elder care. Consequences of both revolutions include the devaluation of the experience that comes with age as a source of knowledge, and the increasing likelihood that the aged will not be cared for by family members, which in both areas has been disguised by the belief that family values will insure elder care. Older women have been particularly disadvantaged as a result.

In my 1984 book, Sharing the Same Bowl, 2 I suggested, with the temerity of youth, that before colonialism for Ga people in Accra, Ghana, and perhaps in Africa generally, age was a more important indicator of status and authority than gender. British colonialism then imposed European-style male dominant notions upon more egalitarian local situations to the detriment of women generally; gender became a key ascriptive characteristic that weakened women's power and authority.

Subsequent research in Nairobi, Kenya, indicated that I had previously overgeneralized about Africa, as many do. Gender was more salient for central Kenyan peoples before colonialism than it was in Accra, Ghana, but age was still crucial in determining authority. In contrast with Accra, where women had traded for hundreds of years and achieved jural majority (not unrelated phenomena), the limited evidence about central Kenya indicated that, at least by the 1880s and 1890s, women were legal minors and sometimes even treated as male property, a situation similar to that of [End Page 174] European women of the same time. 3 The paradox was that in central Kenya, while age seemed to be the overriding principle of social organization in which senior age-sets exercised power, gender was also a primary way of ascribing status. Age-sets were established by puberty rites that involved male circumcision and female clitoridectomy. Factors like strong patrilinearity and patrilocality, and women's inferior land rights and lesser involvement in trade, made women more dependent on men than was generally the case in coastal West Africa. However, in central Kenya, some senior women had much authority. I modified my hypothesis somewhat, arguing instead that in precolonial Africa age was a primary principle determining authority that superseded gender to varying degrees depending on the situation, but always had major salience.

Why age before gender? In preindustrial societies, knowledge generally came from experience rather than formal schooling. On the West African coast, for instance, apprenticeships (paid and unpaid) were common means of imparting skills. Most people learned job-related tasks relevant to appropriate gender roles from their parents and other senior relatives of the same sex. Similarly, the religious knowledge that imparted ritual authority, which had political import, was passed from seniors to juniors through rigorous indoctrination processes, as were the oral traditions that provided the foundational myths and history essential to societal identity. Also, the organization of lineages gave their senior members the power to allocate significant resources and to accumulate wealth in many cases. Elders arranged the marriages of junior lineage members and collected and distributed bridewealth. Women as well as men were often primary actors in these events, but men were more...

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