Subject: Re: On interracial relationships, or anything
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 1998 12:15:00 GMT
David McDuffee (mcduffee@netcom.com) wrote:
: In article ,
: >How about Hatshepsut, Nzinga, Yaa Asantewaa?
: >Not only did they get to speak, they ruled.
: The fact that exceptional examples can be cited does not make female rule
: the rule, any more than the occasional wife beater proves all men are
: brutes. One must look at the totality ...
I did not claim that the African constitution calls for
females to rule. I merely dispute the assertion that
females under the traditional African constitution are
oppressed. And I reject the implication that female
circumcision is a sufficient demonstration of the alleged
oppression of women. I cite the examples of females who
ruled in traditional Africa because they offer glaring
contrast, for example, to any of the states of Araby,
where women are constitutionally ineligible, also,
parenthetically, to the United States, which, despite
"universal" adult suffrage, is yet to have a woman as
a president. Indeed, one must look at the totality of
the evidence.
: >The African order is/was different from the European and
: >Arabic in significant ways. I mentioned (1) matrilineal
: >rules of inheritance in Africa, in contrast to Europe and
: >Arabia, where patrilineal succession and inheritance
: >obtained;
: Is matrilineal inheritance morally superior to patrilineal
: inheritance? Other than the diminished importance of paternity,
: the two seem pretty equivalent.
The point, lest we forget, was about the supposed oppression
of women in Africa. It is hard to square matrilineal inheritance
with *oppression* of women. I have never denied that women
have soecietal *roles* different from men. Difference in roles
does not however amount to *oppression* of one by the other,
although I can see how those trapped in Euro-thought might
think that, since to them, differences must always be lined
up in a linear arrangement, with superiority/inferiority
relations implied. African thought permits greater subtlety
than that.
The point *you* raise, in the predictable fashion of
Euro-thought, namely of moral superiority of matrilineal vs
patrilineal rules of inheritance is another question.
Matrilineal succession is important because the Africans
looked for balance in their social arrangements, the way
the Americans talk incessantly about their vaunted
constitutional checks and balances. With exceptions, some
of which have been discussed, the traditional African kingship,
and the traditional African head-of-family, was seen as a
male function, spiritually the domain of Heru, Shango,
and equivalent deities. Even when women were rulers,
they were seen as exercising a masculine function, under
the guidance of a masculine deity. Since, as could be
expected, males would predominate in masculine functions,
ways were sought and found to ensure harmonious balance
between the sexes. Matrilineal inheritance is one of
those ways.
: >(2) the *constitutional* role of the Queen Mother
: >in the selection of the king;
: Is this morally superior to universal suffrage, in which ALL
: women have a role in selecting leaders?
Again, the point at issue was whether women were oppressed
in African society. The *constitutional* role of the
Queen Mother, in contrast for example, to the non-existent
role of women in Araby, remains on point so far as the
alleged oppression of African women is concerned. The
Queen Mother, by the way, could be unrelated to the
King, but was/is often the king's sister, and had the
right and responsibility to rebuke the king whenever he
overstepped the bounds. The African woman has always
had the right and responsibility of "sassing" the man.
The "strong Black woman" archetype is *not* the creation
of liberal, Western, universal suffrage. Harriet Tubman
was a pure, African, creation, in the African tradition.
So also was Sojourner Truth. European women by comparison
were imprisoned in a cage of meekness and submissiveness,
even the cage was put upon a pedestal by European
men. They could nag, or hen-peck, but they could not
sass; they didn't know how, and it was not constitutionally
sanctioned, as it was with African women. That explains
a lot, doesn't it? In any case, European women are
only now coming out from under the domination of their
men, and are proceeding from a fundamentally flawed
premise, namely that there is "no difference" between
men and women. THe African did not make so elementary
a mistake, even as they sought, and largely succeeded,
in instituting a harmonious balance of powers and
roles between the sexes.
As to your point about the moral superiority of
universal suffrage, that is another, meta-constitutional
issue I'd love to discuss some time, but here it is not
on point. I will say only that the Africans did not
have universal suffrage and did not believe in it. They
believed in eldership, as also do, for example, the
current Amish people of Pennsylvania. The traditional
African rested on a considered rejection of the notion
that the individual is the fundamental unit of society,
in favor of the notion that it is the family which
provides such a foundation. The family lives on, even
as individuals die, and it is the family that is
represented in eldership councils, from the smallest
village council on up to the highest councils of state.
I assert that universal suffrage gives the *appearance*
of democracy, not the reality, and that the so-called
American democracy was long ago subverted by, and
subordinated to, non-democratic interests and control.
Traditional eldership systems have also been subverted,
by the colonialists deliberate driving of a wedge between
traditional rulers and ruled, and the setting up of
"modern" instruments of state antagonistic to the older,
traditional order. Chaos is the result. The Akan
nation, for example, stretches across the country
boundaries drawn by the colonialist, covering parts
of Ghana, Togo, and the Ivory Coast. The Yoruba nation,
likewise, though mostly centered in Nigeria, also
spills over into Benin. Etc. The chaos though should
not be taken as indicative of the fragility of the
social and political systems established under the
traditional order. On the contrary, the continuing
existence of the traditional systems, and the fact that
they survived the colonial and neo-colonial holocaust,
is indicative of their fundamental strength. But I
digress. The meta-constitutional question as to
which system is "superior" is another thread, and for
the discussion to proceed, certain Western preconceptions
would need, if only temporarily, to be set aside.
: >and (3) the fact that
: >female priests outnumber male priests by a large margin,
: >in contrast to European and Islamic practice where the
: >"leader of the flock" is a position (still) reserved for males.
: Several European religions, both historical and present-day, have no
: prohibitions barring female leadership, or encourage female leadership
: at the expense of male leadership. Even if this were not the case,
: the two systems still appear to be symmetrical, and morally equivalent.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
: Whether women outnumber men, or men outnumber women, one can argue that
: the "outnumbered" group is being stifled.
There you go again, off point about "moral equivalence".
I repeat: the issue in contention was whether women were
oppressed in African society. I merely alluded to the
fact that, still today, the (European) Roman Catholic
church has not allowed women into the priesthood, and Islam
(except perhaps for the Nation of Islam) still does not
allow its imams to be women. And I contrasted that with
the fact that since time immemorial, African women have
not only been "allowed" into these positions, but predominate.
Look, let me put it bluntly. I have been to Africa, and
I have been around African spiritualists. African women
have *power*. They are not shrinking violets, meek and
submissive. I would say the same of African-American
women, and I would assert that that sense of self, that
*power* that African women everywhere have, goes back
a long, long way, *to* Africa, and certainly is not
the gift of Gloria Steinem and modern, Euro-notions of
feminism. Female circumcision to the apparent contrary
notwithstanding.
: >Ghana at which I attended a durbar presided over by the
: >Akwamuhene, the (male) chief of the Akwamu region, the
: >Queen Mother had a prominent role, and did in fact speak.
: >She was no shrinking violet, either. The *fact* is that
: >Africans sought in their social arrangements to have a
: >harmonious balance between the sexes. Wherever there is
: >a hene (male chief) there is a corresponding hema (female).
: But are they equivalent?
This Euro-notion that women are not equal unless they are
there in the fox-hole fighting alongside the men, is an
absurdity that the African mind does not entertain for
a minute. Difference does not equal oppression.
: >Where there is God-the-Father, there is also God-the-Mother.
: But are they equivalent?
Since you are obviously allergic to Afro-thought, let me
use Sino-thought instead. Are yin and yang equivalent?
Do you see yang (male, aggressive, external) energy as
superior to yin (female, receptive, internal) enegy?
Or do you see them, as do the Chinese, and the Africans,
as being complementary energies? If they are complementary,
would you then see them as "equivalent"?
: >I am aware that it has become faddish in modern Western
: >society to insist that there should be "no difference"
: >between male and female roles in society, hence we see
: >women in combat, women on the police beat, women firefighters,
: >etc. Traditional African society would never make such
: >an elementary mistake. WHat they sought was not sameness
: >between the sexes, which is contrary to nature, but balance
: >and complementarity. The latter cannot be construed as
: >sexism in the sense of which the European and Arab are
: >clearly guilty.
: So they're NOT equivalent. "Balance and complementarity"
: in which the male is superior and the female subservient,
: in which men have opportunities which are systematically
: denied to women, is an oppressive system.
Classic Euro-thought.
: The "natural
: order" argument was once used to justify the "balance
: and complementarity" down on the plantation...
Except that the Africans enslaved on the plantation belonged
to a race and a continent that gave the barbarian *all* of
his arts and sciences: reading, writing, arithmentic, geometry,
astronomy, logic, dance, drama, literature, concepts of
God, religion, and spirituality, etc., which is and remains
the fundamental refutation of the supposed natural order
that existed on the plantation. Let us be blunt. The
enslaved human being does not "complement" his barbarian
enslaver; the enslaver establishes himself on the neck
of the enslaved as would a parasite, which then proceeds
to grow fat, sucking on the blood of land-theft and labor-
theft. That is immoral. That women were gifted by God
with the womb and the vagina, and nurturing instincts
and faculties, while men were gifted with the penis and
superior muscle mass suited for aggression, is simple
*fact*, and it is only in the Euro-mind that these differences
line up in a linear arrangement of superior/inferior.
Every man came from a woman, and no child would issue
unless man and woman first come together (except perhaps
in the Brave New World of the Euro-insane); if, by
contrast, the European had stayed in Europe, the rest
of the world would have got on quite happily without
him. So don't insult the collective intelligence of
Blackfolk by equating, even if only in spurious argument,
race-based oppression as practiced by white folk,
with sex-based role-differentiation as practiced by
Africans, or Chinese for that matter.
: --
: David McDuffee
: mcduffee@netcom.com
"From the time that Shango first condemned his
Muntu to suffer under an alien yoke in alien
lands, to this day, centuries have passed and
your fists have not yet carried out his command
to set yourselves free!"
--Zapata Olivella
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