Lifting the Loincloth: Reframing the discourse on gender,identity,and traditions – Strategies to combat the lingering legacies of spectacles in the scholarship on East and East Central Africa

Abstract

After two decades of research in East and East Central Africa on early precolonial history, the authors of this article began a collaborative project focused on gender and identity with an aim of addressing and rectifying categories that commonly appear in anthropological and historical studies. Our position is that present day gender and identity categories applied to the deep past are problematic because they too often miss the nuances of gender, identity, and power dynamics in Africa. This has resulted in a common perception that African women have been perpetual victims and that identity is universal and static. We acknowledge that the corpus of nineteenth and twentieth century anthropological and historical works are a rich resource for researchers if critically reexamined in light of more recent research on gender and identity. We posit new approaches that might inspire a conversation to create more culturally germane categories for particular African contexts. Anthropology and history have greatly influenced public understandings of women and ethnicity in Africa. Thus it is well worth a more vigorous reexamination of how we can construct more accurate historical representations both of African women’s statuses in societies and identities as represented in ethnicity, traditions, or other relevant expressions.