Masculinities in Contemporary Africa

Chapter 2 - Studying Men in Africa Critically

2 Studying Men in Africa Critically Kopano Ratele How vital is it to study men? My purpose in this study is to show that it is as essential to investigate a Mopedi or Sudanese man (as instances) as one of the Bapedi ethnic group or the Sudanese nation as it is to look at them as men of the Bapedi and men in Sudan. It is equally important to study a man as a part of the group called men as is to study them as ethnic or national subjects. Then again, perhaps one ought to pose the question directly: whether there is anything of consequence that gets lost from studying men indirectly. I mean by this, whether there is something of significance we miss if we adopt a lens that, for instance, places women at the centre in studying men, as feminist studies have done for long. I shall maintain that we do indeed tend to mis-appreciate some of the true forms and functions of psychic structures, the world of labour and capital, cultural forms and political landscape if we do not examine closely the deployment of masculinity in the structuring of psyches, in employment and money-making, in culture and politics. It is important to stress that what I suspect is an ever-present possibility of mis-appreciation, not malevolence; I see the project of studying men as related to and supportive of radical gender transformation, at least in Africa. For anyone concerned with injustice around the world, a study of men cannot be underlined by the project of subverting male power, of reworking hegemonic masculinities and gendered superiority. In such a world as we have, authenticating manhood or finding the lost key to being a true male cannot be the driving purpose of our investigation of masculinity. Even as I seek to show the gain of investigating men as subject to gender power as much as they are of ethnic or linguistic power, race or national ideology, culture or class, I am at once going to allow myself to wonder whether it is best to do so by putting our energies towards 19 Ratele: Studying Men in Africa Critically building a discipline around a men’s discipline that will be the dedicated vehicle for this task, or whether it will suffice to examine men as a unit of analysis, infusing masculinity within, for example, social and developmental psychology, economics, cultural studies, politics. In this chapter, I draw a simple sketch, depicting researches and other interventions on men and their development around the continent. My intention is to work from this towards showing reasons that support further efforts to study men in Africa. Finally, I indicate what form I believe such studies ought to take and why. I will begin by making a distinction of some import around orientation towards men. I then present and analyse a case of a letter to a newspaper. The letter is used to ground subsequent arguments about the form and contexts of our approaches in investigating men: approaches which, for the sake of argument, are here distinguished into two broad lines. I then go on to show that what the letterwriter (and indirectly, in his reception to the letter, the newspaper’s editor) is intent on is buttressing or recuperating a particular form of masculinity, an instance of masculinity as this form of masculinity must not be regarded as the only masculinity in town, even though the masculinity being argued for by the letter is indeed the main masculinity. The point made in this section is that not to pay attention to insignificant matters within the idea of masculinity and a man contained in that letter is to continue in the direction of a massive submerged iceberg in the dark. The struggles for a just gender order requires pointing out why some work around men and boys needs to be viewed and brought even closer together rather than parallel to or away from struggles for women’s liberation around the world, around the continent, and in local settings. An Upsurge of Research At the start one ought to take note of the fact that as a disciplinary formation, what I shall for my purposes call men’s studies or critical studies of men, is nonexistent on the continent. Nevertheless, it needs pointing out that there has in recent times been an upsurge of empirical studies, courses, conferences, symposia and institutes about men and masculinities. With this is meant that while critical...