This chapter discusses Western perspectives on women of African descent. Western scholarship has tended to be patronising and essentialising in the manner it depicts women from Africa. This otherness of African women is characterised by the presumed inferiority, poverty, docility, passivity, dependency, illiteracy, traditionalism, domestic bound, powerlessness, subjugation, and lack of intelligence. The chapter traces the dark continent and otherness narratives back to the beginnings of Western civilisation before discussing the 14th-17th century European travellers' ambivalent and largely negative narratives of African women. The travellers considered female bodies of Africans uncivilised and unable to fully conform to the socioeconomic and political environment of the civilised West. The chapter discusses sexual exploitation of African women through rape- and systems of concubinage during colonialism. The Black female form was associated with many destructive stereotypes, claiming her to be sexually deviant, primitive, subhuman, hypersexual, and an uncontrollably erotic creature.
Top1. Introduction
Within Western history and scholarship, the African woman has been associated with many destructive stereotypes: sexually deviant, primitive, subhuman, hypersexual, an uncontrollably erotic creature, and so on. Edward Said (1978) claims that no matter how well-intentioned the Western feminist discourse is, it has always been complicit with the workings of Western power. African women have been depicted with cliché roles and positions and stereotypical representation and sometimes silencing that has often hindered them from expressing the problems they face. Controlling images of Black women that originated during the slave era attest to the ideological dimension of Black women’s oppression (King, 1973; White, 1985; Carboy, 1987; Morton, 1991). For Hill-Collins (2000), these racist and sexist ideologies permeate the social structure to such a degree that they become hegemonic and seen as natural, normal and inevitable. In this context, certain assumed qualities that are attached to Black women are used to justify oppression.
According to Mohanty (1988), Western feminist scholarship, has tended to produce monolithic, universalising and essentialising constructions of women in developing countries. She is particularly critical of the discursive production of the developing world women that tend to erase historical and geographical specificities. She further argues that even the Western feminist discourse itself, is not homogeneous. Why then dumping developing countries feminism into a monolithic same-size-fit-all pit as though developing countries women were logs or rubbish thrown into the same bin? Mohanty (1988) concludes that Western scholarship overgeneralises the situation of women in both the Western and developing communities as guided by their egoistic self-referencing criterion or ethnocentrism leading to false assumptions. Mohanty is especially critical of the assumptions that women are an already constituted, coherent group with identical interests and desires, regardless of class, ethnic or racial location; and the classical Western binary notion of men as oppressors and women as oppressed. This universal concept of patriarchy does not consider the various socio-political contexts, thereby robbing women of their historical and political agency and portraying them as simple victims. This overgeneralisation tends to damage the solidarity among women by dividing them into two opposite groups: i) Western women (universally liberated, enjoying equality, having control over their own bodies and sexuality, superior, intelligent, educated, secular, free minded); and ii) developing world women (universally uneducated, victimised, sexually battered, religious, family oriented, weak, powerless and domestic). Thus, Western scholarship attitude towards developing countries women is very paternalistic with economic, religious and familial structures all judged by Western standards (Mohanty, 1988).
This chapter discusses Western perspectives on women of African descent. Western scholarship has tended to be patronising and essentialising, if not outright oppressive and colonising in the manner it depicts women from Africa. They are recklessly dumped into the essential category African women. The chapter begins by presenting a Western classical overview of women before tracing the Dark Continent and Otherness narratives back to the beginnings of Western civilisation. This is followed by discussion of the 14th-17th Century European travellers’ ambivalent and largely negative narratives of African women. The chapter then goes on to discuss the life of Sarah Baartman, one of the first Black women known to be subjugated to human sexual trafficking, before discussing sexual exploitation of African women through rape, systems of concubinage and treating them as subsets of humanity during colonialism. The chapter further discusses Christianity which demonised all African practices especially those peculiar to women. The chapter ends by discussing the contemporary paternalistic attitude on African women by Western feminists.