Hypatia

Nkiru Uwechia Nzegwu’s Family Matters joins important new scholarship that explores the previously neglected sources for female power and authority in non-Western or nonmodern cultures. The very best of this new scholarship not only challenges stubborn prejudices that these other cultures are less sophisticated than our own but also poses challenging questions for feminism. Nzegwu’s outstanding book is among the best of this new scholarship. Nzegwu explores the role of the family in the precolonial political structure of Igboland, Nigeria, and argues that the feminist concepts underlying this nonpatriarchal African culture may provide a basis for rethinking the framework of Western feminism.

A key part of the framework is the tendency among liberal feminist theorists to oppose the rights of individuals to the claims made on behalf of protecting traditional cultures. If we looked only at how these cultures are currently constructed and interpreted, we would be right to suspect the claims of traditional cultures such as those in Africa. Over the past few decades, landmark court cases in Africa have cast the individual rights of women against the interests of preserving so-called traditional African cultures, and typically, the latter interests have prevailed to women’s detriment. Nzegwu argues, however, that current interpretations of African norms and traditions are recent inventions and not true traditions. Moreover, current interpretations grow out of European colonial policies. Prior to colonialism, women played important roles in African cultural traditions, where power between men and women was more evenly balanced. Hence protecting the claims of these older cultures in contrast with the more recently invented ones would actually enhance women’s status.

After a thorough examination of the multiple roles of women in precolonial Igbo culture, and the authority and duties these roles once sustained, Nzegwu argues that 1) all concepts of rights are rooted in a specific culture, and 2) older African cultures that had once supported a dual-gender cultural and political system provide a more egalitarian basis for human rights than do Western cultures. Western feminists support a monogender culture, which is implicitly male oriented. Recent African culture provides an even worse basis for understanding rights. African nations insist on anchoring rights in cultural values, but construe these values in terms of colonialist and nationalist policies. These policies remove women from their traditional positions of power and reduce them to the role of wife and dependent in their husband’s household.

Nzegwu lays out the differences between the nuclear family model preferred in the West with the different forms of family relationships found in Africa, [End Page 224] including consanguineal, polygamous (with men or women having either multiple wives or husbands), matrilineal, patrilineal, matrifocal, and patriarchal. In the complex precolonial Igbo family, all kin were treated as persons with rights, powers, and responsibilities. These family systems were hierarchical but they are not necessarily patriarchal.

Western feminist gender analyses typically treat any kind of social hierarchy or sex difference as oppressive, or so Nezegwu claims. In contrast, older African cultures sustained social hierarchies based on sex roles, but the distribution of rights and powers among these diverse sex-based roles allowed for a sophisticated system of checks and balances among men and women. And this social system was not patriarchal; on the contrary, its axis was maternal.

Nzegwu wrestles authentic African cultural traditions out from under the control of African patriarchs and feminism out from under Western liberal individualism. Igbo communities did not set up men and women as adversaries or otherwise disconnected individuals but as interdependent, and thus it encouraged relationships of cooperation and solidarity. Western feminists might be wary lest these dual-sex communities impose one single model of female identity, but Nzegwu assures us they did not. For example, these older cultures allowed women to raise children in woman-woman marriages. However, as mentioned above, these communities also turned on the importance of motherhood. On the one hand, women who did not have children had lower social status than those who did. On the...