I have written for some time now that I am not iMbokodo. I have also rather enjoyed saying I am not a feminist.
I know feminism is a serious and diverse intellectual tradition, including African feminisms, and that “men are trash” is not its scholarly definition.
But ideas have lives outside universities. In everyday conversation and on social media, feminism can acquire a cruder vocabulary, and “men are trash” has become one of its recognisable expressions.
I have always stumbled over that one for a simple reason.
I have three brothers. And they have never been trash in my experience of them. They are not perfect men, but they are part of the relationships through which I know family, belonging and myself.
That does not disprove patriarchy or invalidate women who have suffered at the hands of men.
Three decent brothers are not a rebuttal of feminism. They have simply caused me to ask a different question: What if I do not want to understand myself as an African woman by first positioning myself in relation to men as a category of power?
What if I begin somewhere else?
There is an isiXhosa word that has helped me think about this: udadobawo. English would call udadobawo my “aunt”.
But something important disappears in that translation.
Udadobawo is specifically my father’s sister. The word brings together udade, sister, and ubawo, father.
IsiXhosa does not leave me with the generic “aunt”. It tells me where this woman stands in relation to me.
Research into isiXhosa kinship terminology records that udadobawo is sometimes described as a “female father” because of her patrilineal birth.
That phrase stopped me. A female father.
It sounds contradictory only if we assume “father” describes only a male person rather than also a social position.
Udadobawo does not become a man. Nor does she have to take authority away from her brother to possess authority of her own.
She and her brother are children of the same house. She was intombi there before she became udadobawo.
Research by Phemelo Hellemann and Thoko Sipungu into paternal aunties in amaXhosa initiation gives this more substance.
In the context they studied, udadobawo holds an elevated social status equivalent to that of the father.
Her responsibilities during ulwaluko include thatching the initiate’s hut, making ubulunga and ukuyala — formally counselling the newly initiated man.
The same research places udadobawo at another important moment in the child’s relationship with family and ancestry: ukuqatywa and/or imbeleko.
So this woman whom English reduces to “aunt” appears at significant moments in her brother’s child’s relationship with family, ancestry and adulthood.
That has forced me to reconsider something bigger than translation.
We have become accustomed to explaining African women’s lives through a familiar vocabulary: patriarchy, oppression, resistance, empowerment and feminism.
These concepts have helped us name real injustices.
But what happens when they determine the question before we have fully examined the social world we are trying to understand?
We look for the man. Then the woman. Then we ask which one has power.
What if that is not always the first African question?
What if we first asked: Who is she in relation to whom?
An African woman can be intombi — daughter. She can be udade — sister.
To her brother’s children, she becomes udadobawo.
To her sister’s children, she is umakazi.
She may be umama to her own children, umfazi within marriage and, with another generation, umakhulu.
She may occupy several of these positions at once.
English translates both udadobawo and umakazi as “aunt”.
IsiXhosa refuses to collapse them so easily. That is not linguistic fussiness. These names map relationships, generations, responsibilities and sometimes authority.
When my brother has a child, I do not merely become an adult woman related to that child. I acquire another name.
My brother’s fatherhood does not diminish my womanhood. My becoming udadobawo does not diminish his fatherhood.
This is why I am interested in an African-facing theory of womanhood that does not begin with feminism at all.
That does not require romanticising African societies.
Women have experienced dispossession, exclusion, violence and subordination, historically and today.
Practices conducted in the name of culture should be criticised when they cause harm.
But intellectual honesty must work in both directions.
We should also be cautious about beginning with an analytical framework that has already decided what African social life looks like.
Consider patrilineality.
It’s easy to hear “paternal line” and imagine a line made up principally of men.
Yet udadobawo is standing right there. She was born into that house.
Rosalie Kingwill’s ethnographic research in Rabula and Fingo Village in the Eastern Cape found male and female members connected through the paternal line holding rights in family property.
In one case, a woman’s eligibility rested on her status as a daughter of the land-holding patrilineage.
Kingwill argues that women’s claims as daughters and sisters within patrilineal descent were obscured when colonial official customary law interpreted the system as a male prerogative.
That does not prove traditional African societies were gender equal.
It tells us something more useful: We may not yet understand them well enough.
What does it mean to be intombi? Does marriage erase a woman’s status as a daughter of her house?
What authority does udadobawo carry towards her brother’s children?
Why is umakazi named differently? What accumulates when a woman becomes umakhulu?
These are questions about how African societies understood womanhood in the first place.
That is the intellectual space I want to occupy.
I do not need feminism to be wrong for me not to be a feminist.
I can recognise the contribution feminist thought has made while questioning whether it must be the compulsory starting point from which African womanhood is theorised.
For me, the answer is no.
I want to begin with our languages, our relationships, the names through which we located one another before those relationships were flattened into English categories.
And with the possibility that each contains an archive of African thought about women that we have barely begun to read as theory.
Busisiwe Madikizela-Theu, Nelson Mandela University social work lecturer
