On Minna Salami and Can Feminism Be African?
Earlier on in February, whilst the world was gearing up for Valentine’s Day and I was not, Minna Salami’s second book, Can Feminism Be African? was released. Salami is a Nigerian-Finnish and Swedish feminist writer, penning the award winning MsAfropolitan blog. She is also an author; her first book, Sensuous Knowledge, which has been translated into multiple languages, is a collection of intellectually engaging and reflective essays exploring themes of sexism, racism, oppression and liberation. Salami is a poetic and intellectual speaker, combining witty and, at times, almost satirical storytelling with academic rigour. I sat down with her over a lovely but short call to delve as deep as we could into her new book.
Before we dive into the interview, I must confess I have only just started reading Salami’s book. It is engaging in ways that I was not expecting. It is very hard to story tell with subjects that require academic research, but I have made several notes already, on the construct of Africa, the fallacy of written historical bias, and even a quote from our very own Ọ̀rúnmìlà, the Yoruba deity of wisdom and knowledge. When I decided to interview Salami, I wanted to the article to be timely, to be somewhat aligned with the release of her new book. What I could not have foreseen was the accusation of sexual harassment made by Senator Akpoti against the Senate President, her then near-immediate dismissal by the Senate, and the ensuing public debate that has followed, throwing into public consciousness and examination of the nation’s regard for women. The conversations surrounding this echo a phenomenon Salami describes in the interview: the love/hate dualism Africa has for its female leaders, and they touch on the obstacles women leaders face.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Tell me a bit about yourself, in particular the work that you do?
I’m a professional feminist, meaning that everything that I do is connected to my feminist mission. I’m also the Research Chair and a Senior Fellow at The New Institute, which is a platform that gathers thinkers from around the world to collectively think about social change. And lastly, I’m a social critic.
What inspired your new book?
I wrote this book for three key reasons. Firstly, I have been writing a blog called MsAfropolitan, which is about African feminism, for 15 years, which is a long time to be deep diving into a topic without writing a book about it. Then, I’ve had so many conversations around the topics on the platform with various people and I just really wanted to sit with those conversations and distil them into a book. A lot of people have asked to reference my work, and whilst they can always reference the blog, I thought it might be useful to have some of these ideas condensed into a book form. Finally, there’s an absence of African feminist literature in the wider global context of feminism. In the past decade, an unprecedented amount of feminist literature has been published. While many of these have tackled the intersectionality of race, class, and sexuality, the African perspective is still largely missing, so I wrote this book to contribute these perspectives to the wider global conversations.
I love the title of your book. It’s provocative, it’s inquisitive and, as you say, paradoxical. What made you choose this title?
There is some sense that book titles are very mystical, at least to me. They just seem to arrive. I was playing around with the topics I wanted to cover, and the title of the book dawned on me. I knew instantly why this was the title and what it meant to me. I’m a writer who seeks to stun people out of apathy and to get them to think and reflect. Here, I’m asking this question to get people to ponder, also, in a way, as if there’s an already at the end. Why can’t feminism be African already? As if to indicate or to ask why these perspectives aren’t being included in the global narrative. In a second sense, the title also speaks to conservative traditionalist Africans, who have successfully pushed this narrative that feminism is not African. The title attempts to arrest their attention in what may seem like an initial compliance, which, as they read on, will not be found in the contents of the book. The last reason I chose this title is its paradoxical nature. I’m strongly drawn to paradoxes. Paradoxes are generative because there is no easy answer to them. With African feminism, we need to have that conversation because it is a space that holds a lot of tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes, and very often, we are looking for easy answers that just don’t exist.
Can you share some of the key themes or arguments you explore in this book?
A key thread that runs through the book is the issues being raised by Africans. One is the exploitation of Africa; the second is the oppression of women by men, so patriarchy, whether from tradition, culture or religion; and lastly, what are the ways we come out of this space, so the question of selfhood, agency, and autonomy. These three themes are areas I see as central to African feminist political philosophy which is still nascent. There has been a lot of activism and writing of various related topics separately, but African feminist philosophy has not yet been consolidated, and this is what the book attempts to do.
So, how does one define feminism in the context of Africa? Do you think there is a difference between African feminism and the Western feminist narrative?
First, I must say that all feminisms have the same aim, that is, to eliminate patriarchy. African feminism differs because, by context, it is not dealing with the same issues as Western feminism. It must contend with colonialism, religion, class. It must contend with the fact that the African identity has been shaped from the thresholds of masculinity.
I think when people imagine the difference, they imagine this idea of strong African women, this idea of our matriarchs and female queens and extrapolate that to say or believe that the oppression of women here has not happened in the same way as around the world, which is not true.
African feminism is more expansive because it looks at what affects us here, and those are a wide range of things: climate change, extractive, decolonisation and so on. These are topics that African feminists have been looking at and analysing for decades, which means that our political philosophy, in some sense, speaks more robustly to the times that we’re living in.
Are there unique challenges that African women leaders face?
I do think that there are unique trials that African women face it comes to leadership. We are now generalising for the continent, but I have a sense this goes across quite broadly. I think we have a distinct culture where there is a strong regard for strong women. The idea of this strong woman is almost romanticised, which is not necessarily the case in other parts of the world. Simultaneously, the continent is very good at putting women in leadership down (we are seeing this happening right now), which is a paradox. On the other side of the romanticism, are obstacles these women face. There are degrading and derogatory narratives about women in high leadership positions. When women leaders make mistakes, they are punished in ways their counterparts would never be punished; in fact, their counterparts are often celebrated for their transgressions. Whilst I don’t have an answer for why this is, I do think it important to point out this unique dualism of both an admiration and misogynistic hatred of women leaders.
- As I have not finished reading the book, you’ll have to see it for yourself. I do hope that you will pick it up and read on as the issues that African feminism grapples and contends with are salient and critical to all. If the philosophy seems nebulous and far off, its concerns are very real and concrete. Case in point: the recent happenings in the Senate. Salami interweaves history, satire, and intellect whilst taking the reader on a journey in the hopes that by the end he/she will have discovered their own answer to the paradox, Can Feminism Be African?
