African Women's Studies

Apoiando-se nos aportes teóricos dos estudos de gênero em contextos africanos, esta investigação formula análise sobre a participação e as experiências de mulheres angolanas, algumas delas camponesas, no quadro da luta armada pela independência de Angola, entre os anos de 1961-1974. Insere-se no contexto em que este país africano ainda vivia sob o domínio do colonialismo português tardio, justificado com base em teorias luso-tropicalistas, assimilacionistas, e em plena luta armada. Este período é caracterizado por ser um momento de grandes mudanças no cotidiano dos povos angolanos em geral, apesar das sombras do Estatuto do Indigenato persistirem. Para tanto, avalio, assente em diferentes registros escritos, orais e visuais, levantados nos arquivos de Angola e Portugal, quais mecanismos se delinearam na atuação das angolanas na luta anticolonial. É neste contexto que busco reforçar a importância das atividades exercidas por essas mulheres, anônimas, na legitimação, manutenção e conservação da autoridade dos poderes locais bem como dos movimentos de libertação. Essas mulheres camponesas, entendidas nesta investigação como guerrilheiras, desenvolveram “tarefas militares”, nas atividades que executavam nas bases dos movimentos de libertação, e muitas vezes fora delas, cortando cafeeiros, as bananeiras, tirando os paus da estrada, cavando as fossas para os carros não passar, fazendo kisaka, fuba, por fim, trabalhando nas lavras. Dessa forma desempenhavam os intitulados por elas mesmos “trabalhos da revolução”, tarefas constituídas enquanto ações fundamentais de guerra, na cobertura e trabalho logístico de retaguarda. Trato do uso da força do trabalho agrícola e militar na sustentabilidade das zonas libertadas e na manutenção de uma economia anticolonial de pequena escala (agrícolas, trocas, criação de animais, víveres).  Esta pesquisa, portanto, aponta para a existência de uma agência específica de mulheres, sustentada prioritariamente por meio do desempenho das atividades agrícolas, com alimentação e saberes associados à terra, mas não somente. A ideia aqui foi reconhecer que essas mulheres afirmaram suas vozes e capacidades de escolhas no contexto da guerra de libertação nacional. É uma investigação, portanto, que tenciona demarcar posicionamento contra a essencialização e universalização das experiências.

Palavras-chave: Angola; mulheres angolanas; colonialismo português; luta de libertação anticolonial; movimento de camponesas; trabalho agrícola-militar; história social e política de Angola.

Women must be made to realize their full potentials and allow to participate in local & national development. No doubt many women had proved their worth in governance, corporate management, etc; therefore women must be supported and given the opportunity as well as the right to be involved in decision-making and positions of leadership. In a nutshell, I will like to end this write up by quoting Frances E. W. Harper: “So close is the bond between man and woman that you cannot raise one without lifting the other. The world cannot move ahead without woman's sharing in the movement, and to help give a right impetus to that movement is woman's highest privilege”.

It is often assumed that female pharaoh Hatshepsut had a legitimacy problem as pharaoh because of her gender and, in turn, she had to be ‘strong-willed’ and calculative in her actions to keep support of male. This is based predominantly on the assumption that Hatshepsut had to ‘hide’ or ‘change’ her gender because of alleged sexism in Kemetan society. Consequently, this study addresses this narrative by focusing on the issue of gender construction as exemplified by Hatshepsut’s rule as pharaoh. There are three aspects of this study. The first is a review of scholarly literature. The review identifies the variegated, yet structurally similar, Egyptological interpretations of Hatshepsut’s reign. The second aspect is a primary source analysis from an Afrocentric perspective. The third aspect is the comparative analysis Hatshepsut’s kingship in an African context by comparing her to other female kings in African history. Ultimately, this study argues that the ‘legitimacy’ narrative is based on Eurocentric notions of gender and the universalizing of Western gender history.

OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN POPULAR MUSIC. The creative process and the production of success; the political process and the control and management of musical production till it reaches the final consumer is a very topical issue for discussion and research as far as African Popular Music is concerned. This is because it is a very dynamic and evolving field of the study of Popular Culture and there are diverse narratives on the subject. My objective in this Paper is to study and analyse the evolving and changing relationship between production and consumption and the integral role the audience plays in the entire web of interrelationships. It is important to first of all appreciate Music in general and African Popular Music in particular as an effective communication tool. Every medium of communication involves two parties, the sender and the receiver of the message. Some linguists prefer the encoder and decoder of the message. The chain of communication is only complete when certain factors are present in the communication channel. A message must be transmitted using a specific medium (music is one of the media forms of communication). The transmitted message must be received by the interlocutor(s), who is the audience. The process does not end there. The receiver of the message, in this case the audience, after receiving the message, must respond or act in response to the message received. Often communication analysts tend to ignore the third part of the communication process. They stop at the second stage of reception but receiving a message and not responding to it puts the listener in Adorno's definition of passivity. The element of response is vital to make the communication process complete. I hold the cyclical pattern position and not the linear pattern position (discussed later in this Paper). The linear pattern means there is a direct link between the parties involved in the communication process. That is to say, the communication process is a straight line. So for example, the sender sends the message, the

How can one read Mark 5:1-43’s story from the multiple levels of post-colonial, feminist and HIV/AIDS perspectives?  There are, no doubt, many ways of reading any text.  But more importantly each of the above mentioned paradigm is a diverse field of methods and theories.  Mine can only be one small aspect of each of the above paradigms. My exposition will be done through providing a background of a narrative reading of the plot and setting of the story, while the analysis of characters will also come through in this section, it will largely be covered in all other sections.  The narrative reading will therefore be brought to interact with the methodological narratives of postcolonial, feminist and HIV/AIDS frameworks.  Yet the use of the postcolonial here denotes that my reading is both on and through the surface—that is, it also assumes a concrete history of the Roman Empire as well as to read the text as a narrative. The article employs narrative, postcolonial, gender and HIV/AIDS theoretical frameworks to read Mark 5:21-43.

This book is based on long-term research and multiple stays in the Oguta area of Imo State, Southeastern Nigeria. Ethnographic descriptions are interlaced with local voices. . The lives and experiences of women and men in the riverine communities on Oguta Lake provide the background for Flora Nwapa#s novels, Efuru, and Idu, and emphasize the belief in the life-giving power of water.

This study codifies the category of the alt-right anti-hero and the antihero’s characteristics. In examining alt-right digital rhetorics, the authors found allusions to heroism in manifestos by killers, both recent and historical, that highlighted heroic actions from alt-right perspectives that were in direct contrast to progressive efforts toward multiculturalism, gender rights, immigration, and other systemic equities. The authors found alt-right anti-hero examples in Breaking Bad’s Walter White, American Horror Story: Cult’s Kai Anderson, and Westworld’s neo-Western anti-hero, Man in Black, all of whom reflect a growing form of aggressive masculinity in U.S. society.

The black African body is a highly historicised space as it has been tortured and traumatised
through the processes of enslavement and colonialism. As for the black female body,
a raced and gendered space, it has been even more exploited, objectified and fragmented
by hegemonic and patriarchal systems. In diasporic Caribbean women’s literature, the black female
body is often depicted as a site of tension, and a complex entity struggling to make itself
heard outside of historical spaces of oppression and mutilation. This body needs to transcend
traumatic memory in order to renew and heal. Grace Nichols’s The Fat Black Woman’s Poems and
M. NourbeSe Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks and A Genealogy of Resistance
allow the black female body to be heard beyond intersectional oppressions. This paper seeks to
demonstrate how these women writers embody resistance as they assert corporeal visibility and
allow transcultural bodies to speak and heal through creative discourse.

"Passion killings"--murders of young women by their young male partners, sometimes followed by suicide--became a public issue in Botswana in the 1990s, and have continued. Two conflicting narratives emerged, one blaming the loss of cultural values of respect, one blaming the persistence of cultural values of male domination. This paper argues that there is some truth in both narratives, but that an understanding, and remedies, for increased intimate partner violence must be understood within the context of Botswana's diamond-based high pressure capitalism, with its commodification of social relations, and within the long perspective of the impact of Botswana's location as a labor reserve for SA mines on relations of  kinship and gender.

I conceived and realized this study during a month internship with the NGO CISS- Cooperazione internazionale sud sud, in the Tata oasis (south Morocco) in January-February 2009.
The project "Renforcement des capacités d’intervention des organisations de base pour la préservation des écosystèmes oasiens au Maroc" was financed by European Union (Code : ENV/2005-114-657-453. Contrat: 2007/140-910). The study is yet published on CISS web site: https://www.cissong.org/it/press/news/note-genre-sara-borrillo

This chapter undertakes a process-oriented study of genocide to consider how the gendered nature of genocide continues to influence security policies in postconflict Rwanda, and informs Rwandan women’s motives for joining state security organs. I argue that while the RDF’s gender program supports once shared national policy goals to mainstream gender equality across politics, economy, and culture, the program has been designed to help improve the reputation of the national armed forces, and in doing so, sets out to strengthen the legitimacy of the authoritarian state. This is achieved in three ways: by supporting the implementation of internal security policy goals; by attempting to improve civil-military relations; and, by transforming societal perceptions of military women.

In this paper, I will examine the use of language to colonize the other from a slightly different angle.  Most postcolonial debates focus on the imposition of the colonizer’s language on the colonized, its impact on the colonized and the strategies of resistance, but I will examine the use of the language of the colonized to subjugate them.  I will be examining ‘the colonization of local language[s]’ such that they no longer serve the interest of their original cultures, but indeed, become weapons that victimize the original speakers.  This examination will look at the translations and definitions of words in the Setswana Bible and dictionaries, which were first carried out by London Missionary Society, (henceforth, LMS) agents between 1829 and 1925.  The first Setswana Bible and dictionary were subsequently revised by many other LMS agents and church missionaries of other societies.  This paper will limit itself to the LMS work, for it was the most influential among Batswana who reside in the present day Botswana.  Although this paper will be specific to Botswana, I believe that such an investigation will be of interest to many other former colonized subjects who read colonial biblical translations and interpretations.

The paper examines how colonial ideology informed biblical translation, using the case of Setswana Bible translation of 1840. The Ancestors, who represented positive power in the Setswana cultures, were rendered demons.  The paper investigates the motivation, implications and impact of such a translation.

This paper will present some interpretations of Batswana women readers of Matt. 15:21-28. In keeping with the theme of this volume, the aim of presenting their readings is to take seriously the subjectivity and agency of their own interpretations. I shall first give the historical background of these readers and then briefly touch on the methods used to acquire these readings and their framework. Thirdly, I shall present the findings of a questionnaire and the tape-recorded sermons. In conclusion, I shall employ a post-colonial feminist perspective to ask what are the useful models of reading to be drawn from their interpretations.

The immense roles of women in rebuilding the social, economic and political fabric of the Rwandan society after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi steered President Paul Kagame’s interim government to put in place legislative and political measures to enhance gender equality and women empowerment throughout the socio-economic and political spheres. As a result of this empowerment, women representation in parliament increased from 48 percent in 2003 to 56 percent after the 2010 national elections. The trend continued in 2013 with Rwanda attaining the highest global record of 64 percent of women parliamentarians in the Lower House and 38.5% in the Upper House. Other highlights of women’s participation in governance in Rwanda include 40 percent of Provincial Governors, 83  percent of Vice Mayors in charge of social affairs, and 38 percent of District Council members (Rwanda’s Gender Dividend, 2014).
The Commonwealth Secretariat therefore commissioned this research study to evaluate the impact of women’s political leadership on democracy and development in Rwanda from 1994-2014. The purpose of the report is to determine whether women’s increased participation in high-level decision-making has played a role in political stability, economic growth and development of the country. The report evaluates the overt and covert impact of women’s leadership on democratic and development processes as evident in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), poverty reduction, life expectancy, and other development indices. It presents a business case for investing in women’s political and economic leadership, given the evident social and economic dividends that this has brought to Rwanda. This summary report was presented at Rwanda's Side Event at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women- 59th Session on 13 March 2015

This paper highlights the proposed “Talitha cum” African women’s biblical hermeneutics of reading through sketching the practices of four African women scholars: Mercy A. Oduyoye (Ghana); Madipoane Masenya (South Africa), Musa W. Dube (Botswana) and Teresa Okure (Nigeria). As used in this paper, Talitha Cum hermeneutics refers to the art of living in the resurrection space: the art of continually rising against the powers of death—the powers of patriarchy, the powers of colonial oppression and exploitation, the powers that produce and perpetuate poverty, disease and all forms of exclusion and dehumanization. Walking in the legacy of Kimpa Vita, African women’s talitha cum hermeneutics are ways of living and insisting on staying alive; even where one confronts oppressive powers that crushes, one dares to rise.  The discussion of  the above four women reading strategies is preceded by an elaboration on the source of naming, that is, Talitha cum, derived from the story of the bleeding and dying daughter of Mark 5.

Postcolonial theories highlight that imperialism is a military exercise as it is a textual project. Imperial traveling agents employ texts to subjugate foreign geographical spaces, to colonize the minds of native inhabitants, and to sanitize the conscience of the colonizing nations. This paper discusses some postcolonial investigation into empires and texts; it inquires into the role of the Bible in empire-building and the foundation of its role by reading Jn 4:1-42. The paper expounds on the imperial setting, the construction of hidden interests, travelers, geographical spaces, expansion, and the Samaritan woman/people/land in Jn 4:1-42 The reading highlights that mission texts tend to befriend imperializing ideologies by authorizing the cultural subjugation of foreign lands and people. Its conclusion presents one rewriting of the story that proposes the Samaritan identity as an ideal space for contemporary post-colonial subjects and era.

In this article, the biblical Rahab and I ‫؛‬ill pay a visit to Precious Rawiotswe f؛or a cup of ؛‬red bush tea. That is, the story of ‫؛‬Rahab will provide a reading grid by which to analyse a Botswana woman character:. Precious Ramotswe.  She was created and popularized by Alexander McCall Smiths'  The Number 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. This postcolonial feminist reading, ‫ analyses the characterization of Mma Ramotswe through Rahab's prism, highlighting how McCall Smith's narrator serves as a spy who investigates, reports, and translates Botswana cultures for the Western world by using her as his mouth piece. The article explores how McCall Smith constructs a colonialising feminism through the paradigm 0‫ of saving brown women؛‬from brown men. The article highlights that such a  strategy depends on a colonial ؛‬ ideology of presenting black men as docile and over-sexed. While The Number 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series has won worldwide popularity, this article highlights its dependence on colonially-cultivated tastes of constructing Africa as the Other and a readership that still yearns ‫؛for such literature in the Western world. McCall Smith thus indulges in colonial images, metaphors, and narrative designs  of  ؛‬the Other and through them reactivates the latent colonial  appetites‫ of ‬millions of readers in the Western world.

The Bible, its interpretation, institutions and readers, in Sub-Saharan Africa will always be tied to the modern colonial history, preceding and succeeding the scramble for Africa.  The scramble for Africa, was the scramble for Africa through the Bible.  As we shall observe, the scramble to get Africa back from the colonial clutches was and it still is wedged through the Bible.  That the scramble for Africa was a scramble through the Bible will always be an interpretation crux.  The interpretation of The Bible is framed within the context preceding  the scramble for Africa (characterized by the likes of Livingstone, Stanley and Mackience), Western Bible readers and interpreters, represented by missionaries, and sometimes traders, who articulated it in the package of three in western Cs (Christianity, Commerce and Civilization).  This scramble did not end with Westerners sharing of the cakes among themselves.  It was followed by Africans’ scramble to get Africa back from the colonizers in a history that is known as struggle for independence, which is often marked by post world war ii, to the recent post-apartheid era.  The scramble for Africa continues today in the postindependence era, often known as neo-colonialism and globalization, for it has become evident that the struggle continues in the scramble for defining what constituents African Christianity, commerce and civilization and realization that the now is not at all separated from the historical scrambles for Africa.  It means that Biblical interpretation in the Sub-Saharan Africa, cannot be separated from politics, economics and cultural identity, of the past and present. Biblical interpretation in the African continent is thus intimately locked in the framework of scramble for land, scramble for economic survival and scramble for cultural survival. Biblical interpretation remains wedged between western and African history of colonialism, struggle for independence, post-independence and the globalization era.

"A bird with one wing does not fly."
In the Church at large, the life of the Church is often far better represented by its feminine wing. But for theological articulations and development, the voice of the feminine wing is too often dismissed and neglected by domineering voices from its masculine wing. As a result, the Church tends to fly in circles (or sometimes, she simply fails to fly). In African Christian Theology, we need to develop BOTH wings, male and female. Here are some examples of works trying to bring a better balance, by or about or edited by African Christian Women. This list is not, of course, exhaustive. It includes a selection of important books of which I am aware, together with some articles and chapters have been discussed in the African Christian Theology group.

[latest revision:  14 November 2024]

The article argues that emerging African lesbian fiction in English is radically redefining African feminism, femininity, and society, imagining a social change toward respect for otherness and the recognition of individual human rights. by proposing the African woman's right to self-determination outside of traditional identities, it distances itself from 20th-century Afrocentric feminist theory and chronicles a radical epistemic shift in the formation of African women's subjectivity. Its move toward feminist individualism signifies a disappointment with the African postcolonial nation that has not served its citizens and especially women, whose gendered bodies have been used to prop up oppressive traditions. Women's experience of sexual pleasure in woman-to-woman sexual acts is figured as an expression of freedom, power, and agency that heterosexual relationships, corrupted by patriarchy, do not provide.

This paper on gender and the Bible in African Christianity can only give broad highlights on phenomena that can be described in a million different ways in the whole continent, given the diversities of religion, ethnicity, race, sexuality, age and class in each country and how they construct social roles for their members.  Further, a paper on gender, bible and African Christianity underlines new cultural constructions that produce other complex categories of gender for three different reasons.  First, the Bible is a Jewish book that models different gender constructions, according to their cultural, religious, economic understanding.  Second, the Bible is a collection of sixty-six books written /compiled over two millennia, thus presenting conflicting gender constructions.  Third, African Christianity, especially the sub-Saharan one, is not uniform but a product of collision of modern European Christianities, brought by different denominations (Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Methodist).  The European countries brought Christianity to Sub-Saharan Africa in a colonial context (laden with their own cultures) and planted it in different indigenous African cultures.    In the memories of African people, the Bible is thus tied together with colonial history. The Bible is linked with land, dispossession, but now claimed as a possession received through western colonialism.  The Bible is thus described as another set of wisdom, which co-exists with pre-existing collections of African oral wisdom.  In other words,  we do not have one African Christianity, but several African Christanities.  This  background informs three “windows” on Gender, Bible and African Christianity elaborated in this paper.  The windows are not definitive or uniform for all forms of African Christianity, given the complexity of gender constructions; the diversity of biblical books and their gender constructions; the diversity of African Christianities and their gender constructions, at different times and places. The three windows presented here are best seen as invitations to more research projects that are time and place-specific in the diverse contexts of the African continent.  The chapter thus defines and explores the intersection of gender, Christianity and colonialism in the African continent using several case studies.

The Circle of  African Women Theologians symbolises African women's space of transformative power of re-interpretation; of  intellectual invigoration and creative energy; of talking and of thinking amongst themselves in a friendly and life affirming style, while they keep the a  luta continua spirit of seeking and working out their resurrection to complete life.  For this long, challenging and exciting agenda, this paper seeks to map some of their  activities within other histories and conversations of libratory readers and seekers, namely:

1. Some Western Feminist Biblical Interpretations
2. Feminist Biblical Scholarship of the Past Few Years
3.  Biblical/Scriptoratural and Black Biblical Interpretations
4.  Cultural/Biblical and African Women’s Interpretations
5.  Emerging African Women in Biblical-Scriptoratures Studies
6.  Moving With/in the Circle
7.  Conclusion: Circle Biblical/ Scriptoratures Interpretative Practices
d.

Women civilized men, not the other way around. This book is also intended to showcase the the women’s ancient culture from where the ancient Egyptian civilization was born and give the women and women’s culture its due credit.

Introduction
Diodorus Siculus wrote that the culture of ancient Egypt was Ethiopian, due to Ethiopians having founded ancient Egypt and preserving their culture there. What he did not take the time to mention, though, was women’s role in the development of ancient Egyptian culture. This book provides, through ancient Egypt’s Ethiopian Amarigna and Tigrigna dual hieroglyphic language, a way of learning about the culture of the women of ancient Egypt.

Ancient texts are messages from the bygone eras. They stand as a testimony to heights of development achieved by our ancient civilizations. Historians for long have depended on ancient texts for understanding contemporary events of ancient periods. These ancient texts give us a first-hand account of the forgotten events, times and culture of the past. Now we focus on ancient women.

The Rosetta Stone is a singularly important artifact and document that has changed the course of our understanding of Egyptian civilization. The Rosetta Stone enabled historians to bring a purportedly dead language back to life, paving the way for a better understanding of the available hieroglyphic literature. In fact, the language was never dead, thriving in over 30 million speakers.

Although known to ancient Greek historians, like Diodorus Siculus, but unbeknownst to the yesteryear colonial-era historians, the Ethiopian languages of Amarigna and Tigrigna still today hold the elements of the women’s ancient hieroglyphic language intact. New path-breaking examinations about women’s role in the development of ancient Egyptian civilization and invention of writing are leading to a revision of hitherto translated documents and are giving deeper insights into the women’s role in the Egyptian civilization.

This book provides an understanding of women’s history and culture in their development of Egyptian civilization by peering through the prism of dual hieroglyphic languages of Amarigna and Tigrigna and analyzing the hieroglyphs, more so, with the help of those of the Rosetta Stone. This approach affords us advantages of not only getting a deeper understanding of historical documents but also an understanding of vast information about ancient Egyptian women lying embedded in hieroglyphic texts.

Meshing hieroglyphs in-between the women’s history of ancient Egypt, we take a look at ancient Egyptian women’s customs, trade and symbology. Another outcome of this exercise is understanding the global relationship between ancient texts from all over the ancient world, which repeat the ancient Egyptian founding of Lower Egypt. Though a thorough examination of such relationships is beyond the scope of this book, it lays foundations for the students, especially school girls to explore this path on their own about their own ancient culture and their ancient women’s rights.

With the world shrinking closer day-by-day and multi-cultural societies a norm, this book paves way for appreciation of the cradle of all the civilizations and how other cultures have readily embraced the elements of ancient Egyptian and therefore Ethiopian culture and civilization, without knowing it to be women’s culture.

This article reviews the gendered Pentecostal Bible as documented by various researchers. It assesses how the prophetic-spirit framework encounters and functions within the framework of the inerrant but patriarchal written word. The Spirit framework is an oral canon that opens spaces of gender empowerment. Yet Pentecostal scholars problematise the supposedly liberating Spirit, highlighting that it sometimes denies the materiality of human existence and inhabits the constraining parameters of patriarchal church structures. The article suggests that in addition to the Spirit-Word framework, new Pentecostal theological categories, such as healing and deliverance and the prosperity gospel need to be investigated for the new spaces they open for gender justice. 'The authority of the Bible as the word of God, and the experience of the Holy Spirit form two of the most important sources of Pentecostal theology' (Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu 2004:390).

African oratures  consist of a significant corpus of trickster stories. This article investigates indigenous frameworks of reading texts by exploring the philosophical stance of Mmutle, the trickster of Southern Africa, by analyzing eight stories. The analysis of the Mmutle trickster discourse highlights four postures of reading for liberation. First, the vulnerable and oppressed should keep a permanent vigil towards the powerful and always watch out for their interests without fail. Second, the vulnerable and oppressed should be willing to be in solidarity with other vulnerable and oppressed members of the society and to use teamwork. Third, sharp and transgressive thinking skills are vital weapons of resistance, survival and liberation.  Fourth, the Mmutle trickster philosophical framework demands skills of rewriting and redirecting a story towards new and unexpected ends in the service of resistance, survival and liberation.

Within Africology, there has been long-held sentiment that feminism, feminist consciousness, or any train of thought that interrogates the condition and/or position of women, be it social,
economic, political or the like, is an import of the West and therefore inapplicable in the global African context. While it is true that Western feminism has served functionary of European and North American imperialism, the fact remains that in these contemporary (neocolonial) times, issues of gender inequality, gender discrimination, and gender oppression are realities throughout the Diaspora. As such, issues related to gender politics must at the very least be considered if not
appropriately addressed by Africologists. The question remains, however, “From what theoretical perspective and/or methodological framework are we to proceed?” The current article argues that African Feminism, as articulated in the works of Aidoo, Boyce-Davies, Nnaemeka, Nzegwu, Ogundipe-Leslie, Steady, and Taiwo, is an inherently African-centered methodology, and as such one attendant to the form and function of Africology -- one capable of providing an
investigative framework for addressing issues of gender relevant to the global African
community.

The article was first written for the SECSOR SBL, eastern regional meeting held in Atlanta in 2008. The theme of the conference was healing. This article outlines the attempts that have been made by biblical scholars and faith activists to address their reading and interpreting strategies within the overall context of the HIV and AIDS pandemic. This article offers a comprehensive survey of the literature and the ongoing developments at creating an engaged mode of biblical scholarship and practical reading strategies that will be of service to all people suffering from the blight of HIV/AIDS. A particular concern of the author is that such reading strategies should seek to provide liberation and healing for those struggling with this most pernicious of human scourges. Due to its impact on all aspects of our lives; due to its spread through prevailing social injustice, HIV/AIDS is no longer just a health issue or an issue of individual morality. Rather HIV/AIDS' impact calls for a multi-sectoral approach. That is all of us, wherever we are and whatever disciplines and departments and institutions we serve, need to use our space to contribute toward the struggle against HIV/AIDS, its stigma, its impact and for the provision of quality care to the infected. This strategy has been adopted to fight HIV/AIDS as a disease of social injustice. 2

This paper is primarily based on fieldwork research, carried out by different researchers over the last ten years.  It will explore the position of women in the church of Botswana, by examining:
a. women from different church backgrounds, that is, Mainline churches, African Independent Churches, and evangelical/pentecostal  churches
b. How and why they became leaders and their experiences in church and society
c. models of gender empowerment that emerge from the studies.
Collected fieldwork  data , therefore, sought to  analyse stories of Batswana women in church leadership in order to identify strategies employed to assume church leadership. The conclusion maps out  several strategies used by women to subvert  gender-based exclusions , such as the use of an oral canon, instead of relying on the written word.

Paper presented at an international, interdisciplinary conference on Accountable Leadership and Sustainability in Africa: Religion, Democracy and Civil Society celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the University of South Africa’s (Unisa) Research Institute for Theology and Religion, Unisa, Pretoria, South Africa, 21-24 April 2015

By specifically focusing on Big Brother Africa 5 - All Stars- as an example from the emerging cultural and media form of reality TV in Ghana, I attempt to demonstrate that some of the issues raised by reality TV researchers and which have recurred in BB (Big Brother ) studies may be of relevance in the African context. I explore the phenomenon of celebrities and celebrity culture, and seek to show how celebrity culture is fostered by the media and particularly through Multichoice and DSTV in Africa. I discuss gender in BBA 5, and finally discuss some of the ethical dilemmas I faced as I utilized data from social networking sites. In discussing all of the above, I draw on questionnaires answered by thirty three Ghanaian BBA 5 viewers and 1 BBA 5 participant.

This paper was first published in Anne V. Adams, ed, 2012.  "Essays in honour of Ama Ata Aidoo at 70: A Reader in African Cultural Studies. " Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarke.

What is the basic structure of African Indigenous Religions (AIR/s)? How is it gendered?  How did colonialism affect AIR/s?  Is the academic study of AIR/s among Africanists and feminists decolonized?  Using the context of Southern Africa, this paper will address the above questions by exploring the construction of gender in AIR/s’ concepts of community, ancestorhood and the Divine.  The paper will investigate the academic frameworks of Africanists and feminist scholars of AIR/s by investigating the naming of AIR/s and the frameworks of gender analysis within the postcolonial history.  It will further make some proposals on decolonized frameworks of studying AIR/s.

This concise but comprehensive handbook was composed by one of Black Africa's leading Muslim women thinkers, reformers, mystics and nation builders. It is a work on Islamic theology, the purification of the heart, metaphysics and social reform.