Teaching Emancipatory Postcolonial Knowledge

Knowledge

Knowledge as a term, according to The Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, originated in Middle English (12th-15th centuries), where it was called “knowledge” from the verb, “knowen.” Among other glosses, The Webster defines knowledge as “the fact or condition of knowing something with familiarity gained through experience or association.” The dictionary also defines “know” as, “to perceive directly; have direct cognition of; circumstance or condition of apprehending truth or fact.” Therefore, we can begin on the assumption that knowledge has the basic dimensions of the society and the individual, as a human being gains knowledge either because other persons have caused the individual to cognize it or because the individual has acquired knowledge relying virtually exclusively on personal inductive or deductive ability (Ezeh, 2001; Johnson, 1996). Beyond the basic dimensions of knowledge, knowledge has the further dimensions of being colonial (including neo-colonial) or postcolonial. Thus, postcolonial knowledge could be seen as existing both as ego or group-centered knowledge. Postcolonial knowledge is also legitimated as coproduced and shaped through collective agency. The objective of postcolonial knowledge is to facilitate social dynamics that reorganize power relations (Chatterji, 2001). Postcolonial knowledge is a central focus of this study.

Postcolonial Knowledge

The decades of the 1960s and 1970s had marked the era of decolonization in terms of halting European expansionism and fostering of self-determination by formerly colonized peoples. But subsequent decades were marked by growing neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism by European societies that were erstwhile colonialists. To this scene has been added the phenomenon of American expansionism and imperialism, whose raison d’être is the quest for global economic and cultural dominance in the manner of a modern empire with all of its hardly perceptible but very present paraphernalia, including empire ideology, big banks, corporations, governments, the media, and so on (see Chinweizu, 1975; Perkins, 2005). The hitherto call for decolonization in terms of the reversal of European expansionism and the inauguration of self-determination for colonized peoples in political terms has virtually been overtaken by events as the focus appears to be on how to deal with the state of postcoloniality using postcolonial knowledge. Postcolonial knowledge relates to the intellectual discourse that consists of reactions to and analysis of the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism.

Contemporary postcolonial knowledge owes a lot to the likes of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Bill Ashcroft. Their works have proved to be the intellectual foundations in the field of postcolonial studies. Their works have also come across as largely accurate representations regarding the cultural representations of the subaltern “Other” by the West.

Edward Wadie Said was fascinated by how the people of the Western world perceive other cultures and societies, and by the effects of society, politics, and power upon literature. Thus, Edward W. Said is a founding intellectual of postcolonial criticism. Although the critique of Orientalism is Said’s most important cultural contribution, it was the critical interpretations of the works of Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, and other writers that were the influential scholarship that established his intellectual reputation (Morrison, 1998; Trivedi, 2008).

Edward Said is most famous for the description and analyses of Orientalism as the source of the inaccurate cultural representations that are the foundations of Western thought toward the East, of how the West perceives and represents the East. The thesis of Orientalism is the existence of a subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture, which derives from Western culture’s long tradition of false and romanticized images of the rest of the East. Therefore, such perceptions and the consequent cultural representations have served, and continue to serve as implicit justifications for the colonial and imperialist ambitions of the European powers and the United States. Likewise, Said criticized and denounced the political and the cultural malpractices of the régimes of the ruling Arab élites who internalized the false romanticized representations of Arabic Culture conceived and established by Anglo-American Orientalists (Windschuttle, 1999).

In Orientalism, Said argued that much of the West’s study of Islamic civilization was based on political intellectualism meant for European self-affirmation rather than objective intellectual inquiry and academic study of Eastern cultures. Hence, Orientalism functioned as a method of practical, cultural discrimination applied as a means of imperialist domination, producing the claim that the Western Orientalist knows more of the Orients than the Orientals themselves (Said, 1985/2003; Windschuttle, 1999). Said argues that the history of European colonial rule and of the consequent political domination of the civilizations of the East distorts the writing of even the most knowledgeable, well-meaning, and culturally sympathetic Western Orientalists; thus was the term “Orientalism” rendered into a pejorative word (Buruma, 2008).

Said (1985/2003) describes the phenomenon of distorted knowledge by the Western Orientalists in the following way:

I doubt that it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century took an interest in those countries that was never far from their status in his mind as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact—and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism. For it is true that no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disdain its author’s involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances, then it must also be true that for a European or American studying the Orient there can be no disclaiming the main circumstances of his actuality: that he comes up against the Orient as a European or American first, as an individual second. And to be a European or an American in such a situation is by no means an inert fact. It meant and means being aware, however dimly, that one belongs to a power with definite interests in the Orient, and more important, that one belongs to a part of the earth with a definite history of involvement in the Orient almost since the time of Homer. (p. 11, emphasis in original)

In Orientalism, Said concludes that Western writing about the Orient depicts it as an irrational, weak, and feminized Other, an existential condition contrasted with the rational, strong, and masculine West—a binary relation, which derives from the European psychological need to create a difference of cultural inequality between West and East. Western writing about the Orient depicts this cultural difference as attributed to immutable cultural “essences” inherent to Oriental peoples and things (Said, 1985/2003, pp. 65-67).

Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (1989) present the term “post-colonial” as suggesting more than just a concern with the national culture of peoples formerly colonized by European powers after their departure. They use the term “post-colonial,” however, to cover all the cultures affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. This is because there is a continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression. They also suggest that it is most appropriate as the term for the new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years and for the discourse through which this is constituted.

One of the main features of imperial oppression according to Ashcroft et al. (1989) is control over language. The imperial education system installs a “standard” version of the metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all “variants” as impurities. Language becomes the medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the medium through which conceptions of “truth,” “order,” and “reality” are established. Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effective postcolonial voice.

For Ashcroft et al. (1989), “privileging norm” was enthroned at the heart of the formation of English Studies as a template for the denial of the value of the “peripheral,” the “marginal,” and the “uncanonized.” Literature was made as central to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to its political formation. So when elements of the periphery and margin threatened the exclusive claims of the center, they were rapidly incorporated. This was a process, in Edward Said’s terms, of conscious affiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation (Said, 1985/2003). That is, a mimicry of the center proceeding from a desire not only to be accepted but also to be adopted and absorbed. It caused those from the periphery to immerse themselves in the imported culture, denying their origins in an attempt to become “more English than the English.”

In 1997, Moore-Gilbert assessed the emerging difficulties facing postcolonial studies and postcolonial knowledge through criticism from outside postcolonial studies and dissent from within it. Moore-Gilbert recognized that there is a radical split in postcolonial discourse between “postcolonial theory” and “postcolonial criticism.” Moore-Gilbert employed the former to refer to the “high” theory applied by academics from a metropolitan perspective, specifically Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, and the latter to denote practices by writers, critics, and artists as diverse as Derek Walcott, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, and Chinua Achebe whose antecedents can be found in commonwealth studies. Although this rupture had been conspicuous for some time in the discipline, Moore-Gilbert’s work explicitly articulates this divide and proceeds from this premise to attempt an explanation of this rupture by acknowledging that he is aware of the interconnectedness and dialogism of these two distinct practices of postcolonial studies (Kalkat, 1998).

Ashcroft (2001) acknowledged the problems of postcolonial studies and postcolonial knowledge positing that because postcolonial studies took the academic world by storm in the late 1980s, it has proven to be one of the most diverse and contentious fields in literary and cultural studies with its attendant endless arguments and debates. On the one hand, according to Ashcroft, the very term “colonialism” seems anachronistic, a fixation on a period of domination by the European imperial power that climaxed in the 19th century, but is now long past. On the other hand, postcolonial theory has been accused of being the latest master narrative, the explanation of all forms of oppression. Thus, in some ways, the term “post-colonial futures,” for Ashcroft, embodies the paradox found in this polarization of attitudes. In other words, as Dash (1974) posed,

Doesn’t the very idea of the post-colonial valourize the colonial dominance of Europe in the last two centuries? Doesn’t it construct the cultural productions of formerly colonized and now “neo-colonized” states as reactive rather than proactive? Doesn’t it lock the resistance of postcolonized societies into a “prison of protest”? (p. 58)

Another postcolonial social theorist Gayatri Spivak’s reputation was first made known following her translation and preface to Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology. She has since come across to her audience as a postcolonial critic whose deconstructive interpretations of imperialism and the struggle for decolonization seek also to interrogate the very premises of Marxism, feminism, and Derridean deconstruction that underwrite her own work (Mashrabiyya, 2012).

Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”—originally published in Nelson and Grossberg’s (1988) book, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture—perhaps best demonstrates her concern for the processes whereby postcolonial studies ironically re-inscribe, co-opt, and rehearse neo-colonial imperatives of political domination, economic exploitation, and cultural erasure. In other words, was Spivak concerned about whether the postcolonial critic is unwittingly complicit in the task of imperialism? Or whether “post-colonialism” is a specifically first-world, male, privileged, academic, institutionalized discourse classifying and surveying the East in the same measure as the actual modes of colonial dominance it seeks to dismantle (Mashrabiyya, 2012)?

Spivak (1988) generally relates to the manner in which Western cultures investigate other cultures. Spivak uses the example of the Indian Sati practice of widow suicide to underscore the ethical problems of investigating a different culture based on essentializing, “universal” concepts and frameworks.

Spivak’s (1988) work is a critical commentary on a range of Western thinkers, starting from Marx to Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida. The basic claim of Spivak’s essay is that Western academic thinking is produced in order to support Western economic interests. Spivak, like Said, holds that knowledge is never innocent and that it expresses the interests of its producers. For Spivak, therefore, knowledge is like any other commodity that is exported from the West to the so-called Third World for financial and other types of gains.

Spivak (1988) wonders how the so-called Third World subject can be studied without cooperation with the colonial project. Spivak points to the fact that research is in a way always colonial in defining the “Other,” the “over there” subject as the object of study and as something that knowledge should be extracted from and brought back “here.” This, according to Spivak, fundamentally relates to White men speaking to White men about colored men/women. When Spivak examines the validity of the Western representation of the Other, she proposes that the discursive institutions which regulate writing about the Other are shut off to postcolonial or feminist scrutiny. This limitation, Spivak holds, is due to the fact that critical thinking about the Other tends to articulate its relation to the Other with the hegemonic vocabulary. This would be similar to feminist writers that abide by the patriarchal rules for academic writing (Mashrabiyya, 2012).

For Spivak (1988), postcolonial studies must encourage that “postcolonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss” (Ashcroft et al., 1989, p. 28). Spivak encourages, but also criticizes, the efforts of the subaltern studies group, a project led by Ranajit Guha that re-appropriated Gramsci’s term “subaltern” (the economically dispossessed) in order to locate and re-establish a “voice” or collective locus of agency in postcolonial India. Although Spivak acknowledges the “epistemic violence” done on Indian subalterns, she suggests that any attempt from the outside to ameliorate their condition by granting them collective speech will invariably encounter the following problems:

Spivak, Said, Ashcroft, and many other researchers of non-Western origin have since employed Western thought and methods in order to criticize the way in which Western cultures and academic discourse are representing the so-called Third World. The works of these emancipatory researchers and those of numerous other researchers have spawned the central corpus of what we may regard today as postcolonial knowledge. The students, who offer some social science courses at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), are exposed to postcolonial knowledge in terms of postcolonial theory and postcolonial criticism.

Postcolonial knowledge therefore exists, for the students at the University of Nigeria, both as ego or group-centered knowledge. We could thus have postcolonial knowledge existing as the Mannheimian true knowledge and ideology and move up to the level of the society at large to become a pan-social ideology (Mannheim, 1929). It could be constructed by an individual and then go on to gain acceptance by a sub-group in society and ultimately a much wider acceptance at the pan-society level, where it becomes a pan-social ideology. Postcolonial knowledge thus mainly originates from counter discourses that are part of the responses to colonialist policies, agendas, and structures. But above all, postcolonial knowledge has the potentiality to be emancipatory of the subject(s).

Contemporary African Social Political Thought

The University of Nigeria course, Contemporary African Social Thought (Anthropology 354), is designed to analyze the social and political ideas of African thinkers in precolonial, colonial, and postindependence periods. It also takes into consideration ideologies for the social transformation of African societies: for example, liberal egalitarianism and other formulations of African thinkers; pan-Africanism; ethnic nationalism; Ujamaa, humanism; consciencism; African emancipation; revolution; traditional conservatism; and so on. The dominant themes of contemporary African social thought include the concepts of “African independence,” “nationhood,” “postcolonial criticism,” and “independence” (Arukwe, 2010; Undergraduate Degree Programme, 2002).

In teaching Contemporary African Social Thought at the University of Nigeria, Africanness in social thought is imputed in the sense of the common, sociopolitical, and cultural characteristics of African peoples. This is further reflected in the physical (i.e., geographical and physiological) dimensions of Africanness as a phenomenon. So “contemporary African social thought” in the sense of the word—contemporary—more or less coincides with the period of intense European contact with Africa preceding the colonial occupation of Africa toward the end of the 19th century, passing through the reactions of Africans to colonialism and Caucasian racism, down to the era of political decolonization after World War II, and finally the present phase of postindependence, neo-decolonization, and postcoloniality. It therefore relates to the economic, political, sociopsychological, and cultural situations arising mainly from European adventurism in Africa (Arukwe, 2010). It also aims, among others, to deal with the issue of the loss of “dignity” among Africans resulting from colonial experiences.

Sociology of Decolonization

Similarly, the University of Nigeria course, Sociology of Decolonization (with Sociology 435 as the course code) is designed to analyze decolonization in postcolonial societies with particular reference to Africa. Thus, concepts related to decolonization and the understanding of postcolonial society such as colonialism, colonization, capitalism, imperialism, nationalism, postcolonialism as well as the concept of decolonization itself are examined. Also, the phenomenon of the colonial situation and its implications, racism and the theories of racism, theories of decolonization, phases of nationalism, course of the struggle for political independence in Africa, the role of the state government in the struggle from colonialism to postcolonialism, postcolonial theory and postcolonial criticism, indigenous knowledge and decolonization, class and decolonization, consequences of decolonization as well as multinationals and transnational corporations (as current influences), are all discussed as part of the course (Undergraduate Degree Programme, 2002).

Some Knowledge About Africa With Implications for Mental Emancipation

Some aspects of the postcolonial knowledge taught at the University of Nigeria are designed to inspire the students to achieve mental emancipation from colonialist and neo-colonialist thinking or from what Said (1985/2003) would refer to as “Orientalism.” This is done by exposing the students to various literature by African and non-African writers alike. It is done by exposing the students to the works of the postcolonial theorists as well as the postcolonial critics such as Chinua Achebe and Ngugi Wa Thiongo. According to Achebe (2003), the outburst of European activity across the earth and over the oceans in the period we call the Age of Discovery brought Europe in one bound to the doorsteps of Africa, with some dire results for African societies, chief among which was the European trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonialism. Similarly, Quist-Adade (2009), while reviewing the work of John Henrik Clarke, pointed out that European colonialism came with the conquest of the mind. Following John Henrik Clarke, Quist-Adade called for serious academic attention to be paid to the impact of the rise of Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries on the mind of the non-European world. To him, Europe’s greatest achievement during this period was not enslavement and the military conquest of most of the world, but the conquest of the minds of most of the peoples of the world. When Europe found itself out of the Dark Ages and shook off the lethargy of the Middle Age after the disaster of the Crusade, Europeans began to propagate certain concepts that reverberate to this day but which are basically untrue. The most damaging of these concepts according to Quist-Adade (2009) are as follows:

Arukwe (2010) has also pointed out that colonial education was influenced by intellectual outlooks such as the foregoing; so that Africans for instance were treated as objects rather than subjects of history. It is in the light of such outlook that the import of history taught in African primary and secondary schools up to the present time becomes stark. For example, it is taught to African pupils and students that Mungo Park discovered the River Niger. Such a historical knowledge was not qualified, thereby carrying the implication that before Mungo Park no other human being had seen the River Niger or that those Africans whose ancestors and themselves had been living around the Niger before the arrival of Mungo Park were no human beings. What this means is that Mungo Park was probably the first European man to see the River Niger. This is somewhat related to the point made by Achebe, when he cited Huxley’s (1935) book in which she presents a less-than-human image of the African in order to suggest “that Kenya indeed belonged to the white man and that the resident English peer, Lord Delamere, was indisputably its founder” (Achebe, 2003, p. 61).

The emancipatory counter discourse that students of Contemporary African Social Thought and the Sociology of Decolonization are exposed to usually includes a corpus of responses to such outlook as presented in the foregoing discourse. In addition to the works of people like Jomo Kenyatta and the ideas of the pioneers of modern African social thought, the works of Afrocentric scholars are also reviewed by the students. Among other issues that are presented from the African past are some that have implications for gender relations. For example, some of the issues generally presented include the rich historical evidence of the pioneering contributions of Africans to world civilization and consequent immense debt which the world owes Africa, the Africoid nature of the ancient Egyptians including their gender relations, and evidence of Egyptian origins of Greek philosophy and science (see Acholonu, Olumba, & Prabhakar, 2009; Bernal, 1987; Diop, 1974; Du Bois, 1972; James, 1954/1988; Onyewuenyi, 1993); the representation of the ancient Greece’s favorite Goddess of wisdom, Minerva, as an African Princess by the ancient Greeks (Horton, 1968/1969); the equality and therefore egalitarianism in the autochthonous representation of the God concept by Africans in terms of God and Goddess (Acholonu et al., 2009; Nwala, 1993); the looting of ancient Egyptian libraries, and the transfer of technology to the Western world (James, 1954/1988; Onyewuenyi, 1993; Osahon, 1993); the phenomenon of Hypatia, world’s first known female mathematician, who was an African woman (Nwala, 1993); and various other similar lines of discourse.

It is important to mention that one of the major aspects of teaching emancipatory postcolonial knowledge in the University of Nigeria relates to the inculcation of the ideas of the postcolonial theorists into the students. Participation in the relevant university courses (Contemporary African Social Thought and Sociology of Decolonization) is often with the students having to take part in seminars that require them to review aspects of the works of the postcolonial theorists and postcolonial critics as part of their continuous assessment. Central to the very process of teaching emancipatoy postcolonial knowledge in the University of Nigeria is the emphasis on such ideas as “Spivakian” deconstructive interpretations of imperialism and the struggle for decolonization; as well as the “Saidian” notion of Orientalism as a means of imperialist domination of the culture of the (subaltern) Other with the effect that the writing of the apparently most knowledgeable, well-meaning, and sympathetic Western Orientalist becomes distorted, producing the claim that the Western Orientalist knows more of the Other than the Other himself or herself. Such a complex leads to the conundrum of “Europeanized African women,” for instance, attempting to get “emancipated” from African culture and institutions, when it is rather from the phenomenon of “Saidian” Orientalism that they should seek emancipation.

The program of teaching emancipatory postcolonial knowledge in the University of Nigeria indeed utilizes the continuous assessment seminars as deconstructive practice and an exercise in capacity building. Such exercises encourage the participating students to question the essentializing of identity, truth, thinking as well as action that underlie the colonial enterprise of cultural domination or “Saidian” Orientalism. Such exercises create the space for the participating students to understand school-related learning and knowledge production as emancipatory practice that are nevertheless rooted in a relation of identification with their colonial past but challenged by their subaltern practitioners. It permits above all a relentless, genealogical critique of society itself. This is against the backdrop of the understanding that knowledge is never innocent and that it expresses the interests of its producers.

Knowledge From Anthropological Fieldwork or Ethnography, and the Issue of Gender Relations Among the Igbo Africans

Ethnographic materials are also employed in the counter discourse that is part of teaching emancipatory postcolonial knowledge in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the UNN. Ethnography as used here denotes an account of the way of life of a human society written by someone who has enough acquaintance with them. The ethnographies on the Igbo, as a commonly used example in the counter discourse relying on ethnographic material is divided into two broad categories. One is the type carried out by amateurs, and the other are the type carried out by specialists. Among the ones in the first category, we have most of the studies prosecuted by the colonial civil servants working for the British foreign rulers in the 11 years between 1925 and 1936 (Ezeh, 2002). They were called intelligence reports. Anafulu (1981) has listed 135 of such investigations by 72 researchers working in various clans of the Igbo. In spite of such painstaking undertakings, some of those attempts bear the blemishes of works by untrained hands or indeed pioneer efforts. To this category may be added similar works by missionaries or those who, not being anthropologists, have lived among the Igbo for other purposes.

Professional ethnographies on the Igbo on the other hand include those by researchers of both sexes, and of foreign and indigenous origins. While a complete bibliography of these is awaited, some of the best known among them may be mentioned. They include those of Sylvia Leith-Ross (1939/1965), Margaret Green (1947/1964), Pheobe Ottenberg (1965), Ifi Amadiume (1987), Charles Meek (1957/1970), Victor Uchendu (1965), Simon Ottenberg (1965), Philip Nsugbe (1974), and others. Each of these has something commendable to say about gender relations in the traditional Igbo society. Green, for instance, spent 3 years in her participant observation of the Igbo. Among the two basic foci of her research was to find out the part played by women in the running of Igbo traditional society. The other was to understand how the society itself is held together amid the seeming anarchy of its ultra republicanism. Leith-Ross, Green, and other lady pioneer Western ethnographers coming as they did from androcentric societies were surprised at the pride of place enjoyed by women in the Igbo society. For instance, Leith-Ross found that women must contribute to important decision makings affecting the Igbo society, a fact which compares quite favorably with the findings made by their male colleagues (e.g., S. Ottenberg, 1968). Afterward, when Lewis (1969) was writing a primer of anthropology where he took examples from all parts of the world, gender relations among the Igbo were cited for its equitability. After reading Leith-Ross’s (1939/1965) work on the Igbo, Lord Lugard, Nigeria’s first colonialist Governor General, wrote on August 20, 1938, regarding the Igbo women, “She claims full equality with the opposite sex and would seem indeed to be the dominant partner” (p. 6). Leith-Ross herself used the words “ambitious, courageous, self reliant, hardworking and independent” to describe Igbo women. Leith-Ross’ study covered parts of what is now Imo State and Igbo Speaking River State. The traditional all-women council in those parts, it is reported, “enact laws for the protection of the crops and support them by suitable penalties” (Leith-Ross, 1939/1965, p. 6). At the time of the investigation in early 1930s, the ethnographer was only worried about the acculturation that was beginning to erode those Igbo autochthonous practices as a result of contact with European Christianity and European rule. It is possible that if there are places where women are now marginalized in Igboland such was brought about by a syncretic admixture of Christian, Euro-American practices, and some veneer of Igbo culture (Ezeh, 2002). Lugard, tongue-in-cheek, had already referred to some southern Nigerians including the Igbo converted to Christianity as “Europeanized Africans” by 1938 (Leith-Ross, 1939/1965, p. 5).

More recently, McCall (2000) devoted a chapter of his ethnography on the Ohafia Igbo to narrate how a woman if she works hard may enjoy any social prestige including marrying another woman, getting admitted to male secret societies, and so on. Sofola (1992) and Acholonu (1995) both native Igbo ladies have independently written in similar veins from experiences in their own parts of Igboland. Acholonu (1995) states in support of objective representation of the true situation:

I shall attempt to present various images of the African women in life and the arts arising from the multifarious nature of the continent in order to make case for greater anthropological emphasis in the study of Africa and the African women. I am of the opinion that the presentation of the African women as oppressed, suppressed by a male-dominated culture in which she has no rights, no respect, and a status subordinate to that of the man, is a dangerous misrepresentation of the true state of affairs, a negation of the diversity and variety of issues surrounding her position and experience. (p. 3)

According to Ezeh (2002), two basic reasons may be adduced as to why Igbo women are not represented in certain spheres of social or biological activity. Women may exclude themselves on account of self-imposed scale of preferences, given the realities of their biological circumstances. Those who choose to decide otherwise are always welcome. This seems to be the cardinal lesson in McCall (2000). Women are always routinely spared the humdrum of some less attractive, and often energy-sapping, social or economical activities not in disparagement or disdain but in the same way a revered noble might be spared same by his retinue of servants.

One of the greatest eye openers in this topic of women’s delegation of certain social functions to men is contained in the writing of Onyeneke (1985), a sociologist and Catholic priest, following his extensive fieldwork covering mostly parts of Igboland on the subject of mask cults or masquerade. What on the surface is men’s best guarded secret is, in fact, an institution originated by women and handed on to men. In traditional Igboland, women have the final say in everything that matters. Instead of the practice at present when they, as it were, have delegated direct participation in some of these activities to men, time was when they presided directly. This, more or less, is the message of the book by Amadiume (1987), who has been described by Ezeh (2002) as one of the Igbo’s, indeed Africa’s, best-known lady anthropologists.

Evidence that there has never been gender discrimination against women in traditional Igboland abounds in the language which may be compared with some European languages to see that gender discrimination against women in those parts had been long (Ezeh, 2000).

For example in Igbo, pronouns are gender-neutral; the fact of being a male or female does not grammatically matter to the Igbo. What counts is the humanness of the referent. The Igbo since time immemorial therefore save themselves of the sort of problem which Euro-American feminists are just waking up to in the last few decades (Ezeh, 2002).

Let us use the following example by Ezeh (2002) from the Claremont’s Dictionary of Grammar (1991/1995 edition) to illustrate the point. As the feminist movements began in Europe and America, speakers of English will normally have a problem reading a sentence such as the following where people from both sexes are included: Each pupil was required to bring ____________ own tennis racket. In the prefeminism days, the English simply used a masculine pronoun in such a circumstance, whatever was the fact.

These days, no clumsiness, including the outright ungrammaticality of moving from singular to plural in the same sentence and concerning the same referent has been spared in trying to get round that embarrassment created by their androcentric and misogynistic forebears. Thus, to fill in the gap, in this example, you may get as strategies, “his/her,” “his or her,” “her or his,” “their,” and so on, none of which neatly solves the problem.

Now, let us consider an Igbo translation of the same sentence. Achoro ka nwata akwukwo obula weta racheti tennis ____________. There is only one pronoun for that blank, and it applies whether we are talking about a boy, a girl, a man, a woman; any human being. That pronoun is “ya” (Ezeh, 2002).

Let us illustrate also with a problem that applies to both English and French following Ezeh (2002):

If we need to substitute 1 (c) or 2 (c) with a pronoun, we will look for a different pronoun depending on whether the pronoun will replace 1 (a) or 2 (a), a male; or 1 (b) or 2 (b), a female. No such problem exists in Igbo where the same pronoun, “O,” will do whatever the gender is required to do. The phonological change that may be necessary is guided by a non-gender principle on euphony which need not delay us here. Thus, in either case, the Igbo translation for both genders will be

Harris (1971), an internationally renowned American theorist in anthropology, has recognized this problem of most European languages as reflective of unsatisfactory gender power relations in those societies which will take a lot more than present-day feminist-prodded tinkering with the syntaxes of these languages to put things right. On just account he notes with particular reference to English, “The male-centered conventions of the English language may not be . . . benign and trivial.”

If language does reflect gender power relations, and it indeed does!, the Igbo certainly have exemplary ones. Now, the question arises: Why do some writers usually untutored in the science of studying of human societies, choose to slander the Igbo and other Africans as well as miss-educate readers over subject matters they can ill afford to handle?

There is hardly any investigation carried out on this already. It seems, though, as Ezeh (2002) has observed that some correlation may exist between such an attitude and one or a combination of some of all three possibilities: personal frustration, a certain academic fad, or sheer ignorance.

There may also be other factors. But whatever it may be, the foregoing scientific evidence shows it is ill-informed. The literature has no record of any human culture that is flawless which is why the only permanent aspect of each human culture is change. But just because another society finds a reason to change an aspect of their own culture does not mean that parallel changes must occur in all other cultures. The literature is replete with proofs that the Igbo and other African nationalities traditionally have enviable gender relations. Certainly, the whole world cannot be held to be wrong for no other reason than that some Western societies or any people else are thought to be wrong on certain counts.

The views of Igbo women who feel fulfilled in their traditional and/or modern roles are the reasons for the assumption above. Those of lady Professors Zulu Sofola and Cathetine Acholonu have been cited above. McCall (2000) contains such expression of satisfaction by his subjects outside the modern, Western-style institutions.

The last decade has thus witnessed the extensive experience by this writer, who is an African University lecturer engaged in teaching “emancipatory postcolonial knowledge” to young African minds over the years. The work done by this researcher has been closely linked to the lives of young Africans who range from teenagers to young adults, are fairly distributed between both genders, and all university undergraduates taking the courses—Sociology of Decolonization and Contemporary African Social Thought. The experiences are captured in the study that has been running side by side with the program of teaching emancipatory postcolonial knowledge in the University of Nigeria. The deconstructive seminar, which serves as the students’ continuous assessment, was initiated as a sort of reform mechanism in conjunction with this research. As practice of intervention, the deconstructive seminar and this research together represent a continuous process of empowerment where participants are agents rather than subjects of inquiry.

Who Participated and How

Three hundred twenty eight students of the Faculty of the Social Sciences, UNN participated in the course evaluation study. The participants were undergraduate students who took the courses, Contemporary African Social Thought and Sociology of Decolonization. The participants were divided into the following departments and number of participants per department: Economics 52, Political Science 60, Psychology 40, Sociology and Anthropology 146, and Religion 30. The participants were further divided into two groups made up of 176 females and 152 males. They were students in the third academic year and above. The instrument for the collection of the data was a course evaluation questionnaire designed by the course lecturer to essentially get a feedback of how the students felt offering the courses. The questionnaire had two sections. The first section elicited information on students’ knowledge and attitude to the courses while the second section elicited demographic information such as age, gender, marital status, academic department, religion, years of experience in the University. Copies of the questionnaire were distributed to 328 students of the Faculty of the Social Sciences, UNN, who took the courses, Contemporary African Social Thought and Sociology of Decolonization. The questionnaires were distributed to the students during their last classes of the courses. They were given some time to complete the questionnaires and the completed questionnaires were all collected in the class.

Students’ Responses

Responses to the demographic-based questions in the questionnaire by the students show that of the 328 students who responded to the questionnaire, 54% were female while 46% were male. The respondents had an age range of 20 to 31 with 64% of them being in the 20 to 25 years bracket, 34.8% of them being in the 26 to 30 years bracket, while 1.2% of them were 31 years. With regard to marital status, 90.9% of the respondents were single while 9.1% of them were married. The respondents’ religious affiliations show that those who subscribe to Christianity were 81.8% of the respondents, those who subscribe to Islam made up 3.6% of the respondents, African Traditional Religion had 2.4% of the respondents; while 12.2% of the respondents had other forms of religious affiliations.

The responses of the students to other issues of the course evaluation questionnaire showed among others that there is a gender-based difference in terms of preference of topics within the courses. Therefore, when the students were asked, “which topic was of most use to you? Please number all (i.e., 1, 2, 3, etc.) in order of preference,” what was observed was the following: Majority of the female students, that is 72.9% (70 female students out of 96) who took the Contemporary African Social Thought and, 83.8% (67 out of 80 female students) who took Sociology of Decolonization opted for a topic with strong gender equality implication as their most useful topic. The χ² statistical test showed that the difference in this preference is statistically significant (χ² = 20.17, df = 1, p = .05 and χ² = 36.45, df = 1, p = .05).

However, it was not until the qualitative question that followed up on the previous question was analyzed did we understand the reason for the overwhelming preference of such topics among female students. The follow-up question asked, “what are your reasons for this rating?” We have pulled out verbatim some of the typical responses we got to that question hereunder:

Results from the responses to the follow-up question in the survey, which asked the respondents, “what are your reasons for this rating [of course topics according to preference]?” provide valuable insights to how the project of “African-University-teaching-back-to-the-empire” could impact the African youth, decolonizing their mind and instilling dignity and self-worth in them. We may not be able to track or chart the exact mechanism of the action of the influence of the teaching of emancipatory postcolonial knowledge to African youth on them or why different categories of youth may respond differently to the same program as yet. However, that the foregoing responses come from female African youth/students who participated in this study and some of the emancipatory courses taught at the University of Nigeria is indicative of the degree of the patriarchalization of African society that has been instituted among the different African groups that were not long ago rated by Western anthropologists as possessing the most equitable and exemplary gender practices in the world. The sources of this patriarchalization are of course colonialism and neo-colonialism. This patriarchalization is responsible for young girls in African University yearning for gender equity, where their immediate forebears recognized equitable gender relations and in some instances had a dominant position in some African societies as their inheritance and natural state of affairs. Above all, the pattern of the qualitative data is also indicative of the potentials and scope that still exist in Africa for the rolling back of the waves of neo-colonialism, or the disruption and destabilization of Orientalism in Africa.

It is in the foregoing sense that this study could be regarded as emancipatory research. Emancipatory research is research used as a liberatory practice within postcolonial contexts. Chatterji (2001), an Indian-born emancipatory researcher, has described emancipatory research in the following way:

Emancipatory research is generated through political action that interrogates the unpredictable sites of its efficacy. Such research seeks to create knowledge relevant to the communities it purports to serve. Relevant knowledge is necessarily partial, producing multiple and contradictory effects. Yet the legitimacy of such research precisely hinges on the consequences that result. Emancipatory research as advocacy addresses problematics and enters into contested representations. It confronts the truths that sanction existing power relations. (p. 1)

This study ultimately concludes therefore that the phenomena of “teaching back to the empire” by African University (in the form of mounting emancipatory academic courses, doing emancipatory research, workshops, seminars, and other forms of interventions, etc.) are effective ways of improving the postcolonial mind-set of African youth and instilling dignity and self-worth in them. There are consequently a number of implications and practical applications to the findings of the study.