Guest Editor's Introduction to Bodily Practices and Aesthetic Rituals in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Africa Forum

On a cool July day, two cousins wandered through a crowded makeshift market on the streets of Bafoussam, a Francophone city nestled in the Bamboutos Mountains of western Cameroon. Charged by their aunt with the task of getting a robust live chicken at a "bon prix," they navigated through the crowded market, the red soil of the ground collecting on the frayed bottom of their long kabba, a type of loose-fitting Cameroonian dress women often wear in casual circumstances. Like most street markets throughout West and Central Africa, the scene that unfolded around them engaged their visual, auditory, and olfactory senses: women sold fruit and vegetables—the ripe aroma of yellowing plantains in the air—and men carried bags of shiny technological accessories to sell—shouting the prices of bright cell phone covers and shiny electric razors. Suddenly, they saw a tall Cameroonian woman arrayed in the most beautiful two-piece pagne, a traditional garment frequently worn by women in West Africa. She seemed to flow up to a hair salon in high heels on the uneven earth (Figure 1). The salon was blasting makossa, an energetic Cameroonian dance music popularized in the 1970s by Manu Dibango, and there were vivid caricatures of women's faces in varied hairstyles and brightly colored words drawn on the exterior gray concrete walls: "Esthetic Beauty Salon," "Cheveux Africaine," and "Cheveaux Américain" (Aesthetic Beauty Salon; African Hair; American Hair). The cousins joked that they wished they hadn't worn their shabby kabba to the market, as the woman made them feel so underdressed. They tried to straighten out the creases in their kabba, before carrying on with their mission.

Much like the lively scene that unfolded in Bafoussam, the contributing works in this forum use interdisciplinary approaches to stimulate the senses and paint vivid imageries of women's different bodily practices and aesthetic rituals in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Africa. Each author uses gender analysis as a key instrument to capture how aesthetic and bodily rituals have been a primary site for the public construction and performance of diverse (contesting) ideas of African femininities and womanhood. The scenes in this forum powerfully encapsulate the significant connections between gender, aesthetic rituals, and body constructions in five African countries: from newspaper advice columns for women in 1960s English-speaking Cameroon, to the brightly lit beauty pageant stages of contemporary Nigeria, navigating digital circuits that take us into girls/ women-only Facebook groups in Sudan, to beneath the malaḥfa, a veil that has long been popular in Mauritania, to standing on the earth where the placenta and umbilical cord are buried by mothers in Niger.

Figure 1.

One of many Salon de Coiffures in Cameroon. Bafoussam, Cameroon, August 13, 2018. Photo by Jacqueline-Bethel Mougoué.

Africanist scholarship evidences the importance of body constructions and the aesthetic principles of African rituals, with particular reference to religious practices, theater, traditional masquerade dances, and festival performances (e.g., Israel 2014). Current scholarly work on aesthetic customs and bodily rituals demonstrates that women's bodies "have been a subject of concern, anxiety, and surveillance in a variety of times and places across the world" (Ballantyne & Burton 2005:4). Yet gender analysis of women's experiences of aesthetic standards and constructions of the body remains scant. By taking the body surface as an academic focus, the selected works examine aesthetic and bodily rituals associated with women's bodies as sites of gendered agency that reveal much about "the frontiers upon which individual and social identities are simultaneously created" (Hendrickson 1996:2). Through the lens of gender analysis, the contributors exemplify how various aesthetic rituals and bodily practices shape African women's everyday lived realities, reflecting diverse identities through time and geographic regions.

Feminist scholars have long addressed how women's bodily practices have invoked societal unease and anxiety. Nira Yuval-Davis argues that women "reproduce nations, biologically, culturally and symbolically" (Yuval-Davis 1997:2). As the nation's "[a]uthentic voices" (45), women...