In Europe the linking of monetary exchange and sexual or familial exchange is seen as either typically immoral or as a source of humour and dissonance. By contrast, in Madagascar the need to keep the two areas separate is not present. The right thing for a man to do is to give his lover a present of money or goods after sexual intercourse. This applies not only to pre-marital or extra-marital sex, but also to marital relations, though on a less regular basis. … It is thus clear that if the Merina attitude to money strikes us… as needing elucidation it is because the symbolism of money is powerful, not in Merina culture, but in European culture” (Bloch 1989:166—167, emphasis added.)
Obviously, self-reflection of this calibre is no characteristic of the writing of Caldwell et al. On the contrary their text is permeated by implicit evaluations of a kind not totally unlike the imperialist discourse analyzed in the start of this paper, as also pointed out by Heald: “Ultimately their [Caldwell et al.’s] view of African sexuality turns out to be little different from the received version; if the Caldwells use the term ‘sexual networking’ the message nevertheless is that they are permissive, if not promiscuous” (Heald 1995:490). They are the Africans on the whole, but particularly the African women, as demonstrated above with reference to some aspects of African societies, allowing for women’s greater freedom of movement, greater autonomy, greater power—individually and as a group—than where the Caldwells come from.
Read with feminist eyes this is the bottom line of the Caldwell paper: that women in Africa have greater freedom, autonomy and power than women are accorded in the Christian edition of‘Eurasian’ culture, with female sexuality under male control and female chastity as the emblem of civilization. This in fact is quite an interesting outcome, especially compared with other tales of the deplorable state of patriarchal power and female oppression in Africa. The tales of female oppression in Africa were keenly supported by the Church, which—as pointed out by Nancy Cott—offered education and general elevation to women, demanding female chastity in return: “The evangelical view, by concentrating on women’s spiritual nature, simultaneously elevated women as moral and intellectual beings and disarmed them of their sexual power” (Cott 1978:227; Becker, this volume). An interesting observation in this context is offered by Nici Nelson, based on her fieldwork among beerbrewing women in Mathare Valley in Nairobi:
Christian philosophy has always made a separation between body and spirit: things of the body (sexuality?) are valued less than things of the spirit. … [The] fear of women’s unbridled sexuality has continued through the Christian era and permeated the work of philosophers and psychologists until the twentieth century. … In Africa this division of the flesh and the spirit into immoral and moral does not seem to exist (Nelson 1987:235).
As also pointed out by Saskia Wieringa the very idea that sexuality should be placed in the realm of morality and not in the realm of lineage identity and obligations, was introduced by Christianity: “Illegitimate sexual practices were thus no longer seen as illicit (violating lineage rules), but as sinful (breach of spiritual purity)” (Wieringa 2001:9).
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It is because all these layers of connotations and hierarchized dichotomies— spirit/body, Madonna/whore, chastity/promiscuousness—are part and parcel of the concept of ‘woman’ in a Western context that an African feminist like Oyeronke Oyewumi simply refuses to use the concept ‘woman’. She writes:
‘African Sexuality’/Sexuality in Africa: Tales and Silences
I came to realize that the fundamental category ‘woman’—which is foundational in Western gender discourses—simply did not exist in Yorubaland prior to its sustained contact with the West. … The concept ‘woman’ as it is used and as it is invoked in the scholarship, is derived from Western experience and history, a history rooted in philosophical discourses about the distinctions among body, mind, and soul and in ideas about biological determinism” (Oyewйm^ 1997:ix, xiii).
The load of implicit meanings is too heavy, and even worse: it distorts the view.
Different concepts and different lines of thinking are badly needed.