Abstract
If you’re going to write a book, an academic friend jokingly said to me, make sure it is big. There are two reasons for this, he said. The first is that you can stand on it to see further, the second is you can bash competitors over the head with it, especially if it is a hardcover.
I begin my review with this politically incorrect anecdote from Africa because this is a very, very big book from and about Africa. It has an index which ends on page 992. Its front pages including a list of contents goes to page xxxv which means that this tome easily exceeds one thousand pages. One might call it a mighty book.
The production of a book should be the occasion for celebration and this book is especially deserving. It comprises fifty chapters put together by two Zimbabwean and two South African editors. I know of no book on masculinities that comes close to matching the national representation of this volume. It has chapters on fifteen different countries and chapters that span either the whole continent or parts of it (with dedicated chapters on East, Northern and Southern Africa). The author biographies give a sense of institutional affiliation with Botswana, Egypt, Eswantini, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe all represented. This is very much a reminder that ‘Africa is not a country’ and underlines the size and diversity of the continent. The volume can therefore rightly claim to be a product of Africa.
It is testimony to the energy and connectedness of the editors that this volume reaches so widely across the continent. Critical Men’s Studies (CMS) is relatively new to Africa and the ability of the editors to identify contributors and encourage them to showcase their work is evidence not just of their own skills but of the growth of research and how it has created new networks of gender scholars.
The Palgrave Handbook is divided into nine parts, each containing a minimum of four chapters: African Masculinities: Theoretical Explorations; African Masculinities and Embodiment; African Masculinities and the Arts; African Masculinities and Religiosities; African Masculinities and Femininities; African Masculinities and Violence; African Masculinities and Queer Identities; African Masculinities and Health and African Masculinities. The volume is united by its geographical focus although alone, given the political, cultural and historical heterogeneity of the continent, this does not guarantee coherence. The theoretical and political approach associated with CMS provides the strongest glue. This is explicitly acknowledged by the editors who list a range of early and more recent studies to show the connection between this volume and existing works in the field. The legacy of Raewyn Connell is powerfully acknowledged. The gendered lexicon developed by Connell runs throughout the volume.
The editors come from diverse backgrounds. Chitando is a scholar of religion whose work on masculinities has emerged in the last two decades. Mlambo, a long-time collaborator with Chitando, is a scholar of classical history. They both work at universities in Zimbabwe and this is notable because in the last two decades the Zimbabwean higher education has suffered under-funding and isolation. The South African editors, from social psychology and anthropology respectively, are well known to students of area studies. Ratele is a pioneer of CMS in South Africa publishing his first thoughtful piece in 1998 (Ratele, 1998). The issues he raised then, of race, identity and sexuality, have been themes through his prolific writings though more recently he has added reflections on indigenous knowledge, tradition and decolonization. Mfecane has addressed some of the most difficult issues in CMS. He takes up, for example, Connell’s definition of hegemonic masculinity to note that it cannot and does not do justice to local understandings of what it is to be a man (Mfecane 2016).
From the outset, the editors set themselves the task of describing and analysing masculinities and men in Africa in ways that destabilize stereotypes, including that African men are violent. Instead they “deliberately evoke the idea of ‘playing with identities’ in order to express our conviction that inasmuch as gender identities are ascribed and imposed, there is also scope for individuals in Africa to manufacture their gender identities” (2). They locate the book within a recognised paradigm (CMS), acknowledging that men can be or are dominant but entering two important caveats. African men “make-strides-while-struggling and struggle-while-making-strides” (2) and “tensions and contestation between and among women and men in Africa” exist but they (men and women) “seek to be complementary in the quest for gender justice” (2).
The chapter authors are located in many different disciplines and contexts and there are therefore variations in style, theoretical orientation and argument in the handbook, none of which detract from its value. Nevertheless, theoretical foundations are important and have implications for understanding ways of analysing men and masculinities. The two theoretical chapters by Ratele and Mfecane highlight some of these differences. Ratele, of all the collection’s contributors, focuses most strongly on race. Mfecane, the anthropologist, focuses on culture and indigenous knowledge. Both of these approaches have resonance with recent calls for decolonization.
Ratele, in Chapter 2, argues that “To fully grasp African masculinities, not only at the height of colonialism and apartheid but in the world today, an accounting of the struggles of men and women against dehumanisation is warranted” (33). Drawing on critical race theory, he continues that “at one point some men and women were outside of society, were considered property or not quite human” and so “we must endeavour to comprehend the question of being unhumaned, of the subhuman, of being nonmen (and nonwomen), in order to understand African masculinities more fully” (33). Ratele argues that CMS as a whole is weakened by its failure to integrate race into analysis and to give it analytical primacy. In this approach ‘African’ becomes largely synonymous with race, with black identity.
Anthropologist Mfecane, on the other hand, in Chapter 3 highlights culture and lived experience. He develops a critique of Connell’s concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ identifying it as ‘Eurocentric’, because it claims “to account for the variety of culturally lived experiences of African people” (49–50). Its weakness is “a static understanding …. that is delinked from the realities of everyday life” (57). Mfecane argues that the concept leads ‘typical’ men to be vilified and demonised (58). Here Mfecane and Ratele’s positions converge as both seek to reject equations of African men with violence. Mfecane calls for scholars “to attend to men’s immediate challenges like poverty, unemployment, and food security” (59).
The chapters in this volume for the most part do not place race at the forefront of analysis but this does not mean that they ignore issues of humanity. The struggles of men to achieve manhood and realize themselves as men is a thread that runs through the volume. Similarly, the oppressive role of men over women is also recognised. For example, the role of Zimbabwean men in blocking abortion for women is analysed by Malvern Tatenda Chiweshe. In an interesting departure from what might be considered as a conventional feminist analysis of the sexual division of labour Janine Häbel describes women who become primary breadwinners in northern Tanzania. She focusses on “women who took the lead in their families and how their breadwinning affects their sense of self as women” (556). The chapter is titled “If I Had Stayed with My Husband, My Children Would Have No Future”. She makes the subtle point that “what others may render as masculine behaviour has become an essential womanly role” (568). “In their understanding of the dynamics between women and men, they emphasise not gender per se but function, that they are fulfilling family needs that the men will not or cannot fulfil” (568). Häbel suggests that this self-understanding reflects the lens of African feminisms. African feminisms “work against the image of African victimisation and disempowerment of women” (569).
Tracking the origins of the growth of research on men and masculinities in Africa the editors rehearse the connections between gender studies and CMS. In East Africa this is illustrated in chapter 4 by Asasira Simon Rwabyoma, Roberts Kabeba Muriisa, Dunlop O. Ochieng, and Jolly Rubagiza. A more specific origin is identified by the editors as a hub in South Africa. Naming some authors and texts including a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies (Morrell 1998), they write that they “have contributed towards the shaping of the field in South Africa” (8). It is here that the editors imply that the race of these authors “White, English-speaking” is particularly relevant although no clear argument is advanced. If there is an argument it might be that the work of black authors has been neglected although these scholars are now active and highly visible in Southern African masculinity research.
This explicit orientation leads to unfortunate and unnecessary omissions. The four chapters in part 7, ‘African Masculinities and Queer Identities’, make no reference to the pioneering work of Gevisser and Cameron (1994) which is a foundational text on gay politics and identity in South Africa nor to Marc Epprecht’s numerous works on homosexuality in Africa with an early focus on Zimbabwe (Epprecht 1998, 2004). Is this because there is a conscious turn away from Southern African work because of its early influence and historiographical dominance or because the authors are white? Either way, a collection like this loses credibility when important, pioneering works such as these are ignored.
The concern about activism and the need for men to be involved in a gender politics of change is expressed in chapters on alternative masculinities. For example, Malose Langa and Bandile Bertrand Leopeng discuss young South African men living in townships with limited life opportunities pointing out that they do not automatically become criminals or violent but that within conditions of precarity, they develop new hopeful and constructive youth identities. Chitando finds positive alternative masculinities via his activist work in Zimbabwe and in Sierra Leone, Kristen E. McLean and Marcia C. Inhorn identify new ‘emergent masculinities’ which, drawing on Raymond Williams’ notion of ‘emergence’, focuses on process where new meanings and values are constantly being developed which lead to new practices and relationships.
In conclusion I offer some comment on the significance of the volume in the context of the geopolitics of knowledge production in Africa, the development of an indigenous corpus of work and the conversations made possible by a work such as this. As mentioned the handbook owes a theoretical debt to Connell. Connell’s work has always had a political edge and a wide theoretical range. In 2007, moving away from a specific gender focus, Connell wrote Southern Theory (Connell, 2007). She notes how knowledge-production bears the imprint of the power of the global North expressed in the unequal distribution of global research outputs and the revered status of theorists in the global North. Connell determinedly challenges the status quo by acknowledging the work of Paulin Hountondji, a philosopher from Benin who passed away in 2024. She borrowed Hountondji’s idea of extraversion which posits that scientists from the global North take data from the global South and exploit it, denying research agency to the global South.
The editors of this handbook echo Connell’s arguments. There is “a system where African scholars undertake the heavy duty of collecting data in their primary research. They then surrender the data to scholars from Western Europe and North America for theory building. Alternatively, African scholars can only rely on scholars from the Global North to come up with insightful theories on African data” (15). This poses the challenge of making sure that the research capacity exists locally in order to stop extraversion. To a significant extent, the achievement of this volume is a triumph of Southern Theory.
Yet the case is not simple. In using Connell’s work, the work of a (white) Australian, whose intellectual debts include those to Karl Marx, has this handbook really broken free from the reins of Northern control? One vector of difference might be indigenous knowledge. Apart from Mfecane, most authors however do not seek to develop a new approach, mode of analysis or lexicon (Bhan 2019). A notable exception is the chapter by Mlambo and Chitando on Zimbabwe’s traditional religion and its impact on Liberation War Veterans. They attempt to argue that CMS fails to take sufficient account of spirituality and that in at least Zimbabwe, but by implication many African countries, this is an important factor in constructions of masculinity.
In raising this issue, it becomes apparent that there is still much to be researched and debated regarding men and masculinities in Africa. But conversations already exist between North and South, between Africa and elsewhere, between white and black. This volume is, in fact, part of that conversation as it adapts theory and applies it to local conditions in critical not subservient ways. If there is a new path that African researchers can take I would recommend Romit Chowdhury’s epic on the taxi-drivers of Kolkota who find meaning in the face of challenging work conditions and, despite it all, overcome difference as they create the City of Men (2023).
