Molara Ogundipe
Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie (27 December 1940 – 18 June 2019), also known as Molara Ogundipe, was a Nigerian poet, critic, editor, feminist and activist. Considered one of the foremost writers on African feminism, gender studies and literary theory, she was a social critic who came to be recognized as a viable authority on African women among black feminists and feminists in general.
Quotes
edit- The oppression of women, economic or personal, is not solely a White-Black Race confrontation although the oppression of Black Women is deeply tied to the variable of race in the history of imperialism.
- The liberation of women is conceived as the desire of women to reduce men to housekeepers. Since most men despise manual work for feudal and middle class reasons, women’s liberation is feared as an effort by women to ‘feminise’ men, that is, degrade them.
- What we want in Africa is social transformation. It is not about warring with men, the reversal of role, or doing to men whatever women think that men have been doing for centuries, but it is trying to build a harmonious society.
- The transformation of African society is the responsibility of both men and women and it is also in their interest.
- We must remember that there were radical outlets for women in indigenous African cultures, and in our colonised societies, contact with Europe brought with it the inheritance of European movements and social concerns. So there were inheritors of the British suffragette movement in Nigeria, while my mother, a teacher's college professor, was a practitioner of many of the radical ideas of the Victorian period about women. My perceptions of gender hierarchies were sharp growing up. I was raised with a male sibling as well as female and male wards living with my mother. I was much of a tomboy then. I did not have any important position in my nuclear family of five children, meaning I was neither first nor last boy or girl. No position! I could also see that boys had advantages, even though my progressive mother made all the boys in her house, including my other brothers, do housework. They learned to sew, knit and embroider! She also made us share the housework with the house help or servants. She said her children could not grow up spoilt while others learnt to be effective and efficient. So from very young I had a healthy attitude towards class differences, having been raised to respect everybody in the work they did.Gender hierarchies were so sharp for me that I always wondered as a pre-teen whether marriage was a good idea. Many folktales and other forms of informal educational modes existed to help prepare women for accepting male dominance in marriage. I saw marriage in the Christian world I was in as restrictive, though my mother was a suffragette, if there was any such thing. I say "Christian" world because I could also see that women in the local, unWesternised society around us had different values and freedoms. Within Yoruba marriage, the woman was culturally expected to defer to the husband. Yet Christian marriage restricted Yoruba women of my mother's generation in an unusual way (dress, freedom of movement, association, and gainful work outside the home beyond the financial control of the husband). There were dignifying and structurally important roles for women in Yoruba culture, even within its patriarchal assumptions, and some would say, androgynous cultural practices and cosmology of the Yoruba, expressed in the philosophical fount to the culture that Ifa Divination Poetry with its thousands of verses. One argument is that women were weighted equally with men as human beings, but had to defer to men in certain contexts, while men deferred in others.
- My mother took her place very firmly as a leader in many structures, though in the
family, she conceded first place to my father ceremoniously. She acted in perfect polite etiquette to my father. He was the titular (but mild, witty, and very playful) head of the home, though the family finances and other responsibilities were taken care of by both of them. Her politics can be described in terms of her commitment to the emancipation of women within a patriarchal context, not feminist as such. Unlike my mother, many Yoruba women accepted the domestication of women introduced by Christian and British Victorian ideals, because the acculturation came with literacy, other skills, and opportunities that the women wanted for historical reasons. The usual view of the Yoruba people is that if people write somewhere, then they, the Yoruba, must also write - generally do other exploratory things done in the world such as travel, trade, make, use or devise guns, books, or electronic gadgets, etc. This attitude explains much of Nigerian behaviour and values today. The Yoruba, like many other Africans, believe in widening their cultural treasure house with new knowledges, newexperiences. Yoruba civilisation has always been expansive and accommodating. You will find many foreign words from other languages such as Hausa and Arabic in addition to European or Asian languages in Yoruba; you will find Islamic references in Ifa, and so forth. I suppose that is one of the reasons the culture has survived well in the diaspora, in Cuba and Brazil, for instance, where the captive Africans were not separated or too isolated one from the other. Like English, Yoruba has gained one of its strengths through absorbing. Borrowing by the Yoruba is not a weak-minded imitativeness; it is seen as the nature of humanity, I guess.Within Yoruba philosophy, the belief that one must know what is going on in the world is highly valued; one must "have one's eyes widened" - a translation of the Yoruba word for "civilisation". Translated literally, "ilaju" in Yoruba means "the widening of eyes", while "civilisation" is from the Latin "civis" meaning "city". Living in cities was a definition of civilisation for the Romans and the borrowers of their culture and ideas, but not for the Yoruba, who also lived in cities. They were one of the African peoples who lived in cities and towns, not only villages, before the coming of the Europeans. All this leads to the point that we need to define "radical" for this conversation and discourse.
