Kindred Concerns: The Vernacular and Contemporary Media in Africa

The literature on early modern Europe has long provided historians of modern Africa with a fertile space for thinking about worlds not wholly encompassed by enlightenment thinking, industrialization, the nation-state, and so on. Friendly and suggestive conversations have persisted for decades across these seemingly incongruent fields because they regularly produce interesting insights, raise suggestive problems, and provide helpful contrasts. One has an odd sense of the familiar that is off-center enough to provoke new thought. Mary Fissell’s Vernacular Bodies: the Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England is just the kind of study that nourishes these kinds of conversations—as it happens it is in unexpected sympathy with a strain of work on the politics of reproduction in twentieth-century Africa.¹

Among the elements that strike a familiar note probably the most important one for me is that power relations of all kinds in the England she describes were understood to be analogous to the relation between a man as head of household and his family; central to that governance was the relation of a man to his wife, most materially manifested in the moment of procreation. It is striking how important metaphors of marriage are to political discourse in the region of Africa I work in (the west African Sahel); ordinary political language is freighted with language that calls forth images of farmers, families, and mothers tending to the needs of an agrarian household. Women are not insignificant in these metaphors—indeed the primary expression in Hausa for providing significant political support evokes the image of a woman carrying a baby on her back. Fissell’s central observation is that because of the profound interweaving of political power with understandings of gender relations, as familiar political relations were turned upside down by the Reformation and Civil War, family relations were of necessity profoundly unsettled as well. Her reflections help me to make sense of the deep anxiety over gender one finds so regularly in contemporary Africa as independent states struggle to make sovereignty real in a global context that consistently undermines it.

The extraordinary body of vernacular texts she has available to trace the shifting understandings of the female body and reproduction so fundamental to early modern gender relations is a treasure trove of a kind few Africanists could ever hope to draw upon. The advent of print culture and literacy in England generated a civil sphere in which ideas about authority, health, sexuality, and so on could be explored, contested, created, and dismissed. She has in cheap print an engrossing array of materials, ranging from discussions of saintly adolescents to purported witches, to a variety of birthing manuals, to satires and stories of sexual transgression. While print culture in Africa can be extremely interesting and does regularly feature much debate about gender relations, the comparably rich and turbulent domain for Africa would probably be in the realm of contemporary video and audio production.²

Fissell shows that there was not really any single vernacular culture—as viewed through cheap print it was a teeming realm of competition and contradiction in which some ideas surfaced more forcefully at times than others, and in which classical texts could be invoked in support of both sides of opposing arguments. Particularly with the lapse of state control in the 1640s, cheap print culture became the site of a cacophony of conflicting ideas, borrowings, translations, and reinterpretations. She is able to use these sources to tease out some of the ways in which the implications of the unknowableness of reproduction and the female body shifted gradually from a kind of archetypal Catholic mystery to something altogether less admirable, messier, and regrettably ungovernable.

It is hard to know what women themselves would have made of these texts, which reveal a variety of ways in which men struggled to make sense of the female body and the body politic, but they tell us a great deal less about what women themselves might have thought. The anxiety in the texts about the female body and reproduction surely derives in part from the very separateness of men...