Since the 1980s, feminist thinking has been challenged by feminists of colour and/or from post-colonial backgrounds. They have felt excluded from mainstream feminist concerns, and conceptualizations with implicit points of departure in Western middle-class norms and lifestyles have been seen as irrelevant or insufficient for understanding gender dynamics in different settings. This critique has highlighted weak points and blind spots in mainstream feminist thinking, paving the way for broader, more inclusive theorizing.

The particular focus in this chapter is on African contributions to feminist theorizing, with a special interest in the ways in which African feminists have taken African ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’ as points of departure for novel thinking regarding men, women and gender. This interest is spurred bymy own investigations into gender relations in matrilineal northern Mozambique. My findings here – or rather my puzzlements, meeting gender identities and gender relations which did not fit my pre-conceived theoretical understandings – sent me searching for reinterpretations of so-called ‘African tradition’ from feminist points of view.

Re-mapping ‘African culture’

In much ethnographic research on Africa, and certainly in colonial and missionary interventions, ‘African tradition’ is seen as patriarchal and woman oppressive. This general approach has been extended into contemporary development thinking, where notions of gender are often based on assumptions of Africa as ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘behind’, and of ‘African tradition’ as inherently patriarchal: cultures where women are perpetual minors, with little or no rights of their own to land or property, and with little personal freedom.