ginity testing. Virginity testing is said to be an ancient Zulu custom,[8] applied by older women to their junior female kin as a pre-marriage control. To be sure, the impetus for a revitalization has apparently come from below, from older Zulu women themselves, and also seems to be supported by the young women who (presumably […]

to the most criminal element in the country; medical schools where they are likewise convinced of their inferiority by being reminded of their role as germ carriers; schools where they learn a history that pictures black people as human beings of the lower order, unable to subject passion to reason (Mbeki 2001b). But then, in […]

South African president Thabo Mbeki.[5] Negatively, because Mbeki only exposes dichotomies, proceeding to turn them upside down, but he does not dissolve them. By failing to dissolve the dichotomies, Mbeki inadvertently supports and main­tains these lines of thinking. In the speeches in question, Thabo Mbeki goes out against the ‘dark continent discourse’: “It used to […]

As frequently shown and discussed by philosophers and social scientists over the last 20—30 years, much Western thinking from Enlightenment onwards has been constructed in terms of dichotomies and hierarchized binaries, where one is not only separate/different but also above/better than the other. Such figures of thought are part and parcel of the ‘dark continent […]

The title for this section is taken from Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s soon twenty years old but still current critique of Western feminist lines of thinking regarding women in Africa.[1] [2] [3] [4] In her paper Mohanty pinpoints the mechanisms of Western thinking as ‘othering’ Third World women: “It is only insofar as ‘Woman/Wom — en’ […]

gating ways in which gendered effects of current changes on the continent are act­ed upon by men and women, co-producing future developments. In spite of overwhelming obstacles, such as widespread poverty and soaring HIV/AIDS in­fection rates, examples are given of women’s agency in ways which sometimes re­produce and at other times challenge patriarchal structures. With […]

Signe Arnfred The time has come for re-thinking sexualities in Africa: The thinking beyond the conceptual structure of colonial and even post-colonial European imaginations, which have oscillated between notions of the exotic, the noble and the depraved savage, consistently however constructing Africans and African sexuality as something ‘other’. This ‘other’ thing is constructed to be […]