Kenya’s general appreciation of the role of sports in national and individual development notwithstanding, the exemplary performance of Kenyan women in athletics and in sports generally, including related social enterprises, has been inadequately recognized. Even when they achieve notable successes, the low representation of women in sports leadership over the years testifies to their exclusion. Their marginalization is mainly based on their gender and geographical regions, rendering their participation in sports nearly incidental, if not inconsequential. Female athletes continue to bear the brunt of gender stereotyping and cultural practices and traditional values that define gender roles still deter women from participating meaningfully in sports.

Alarmingly, despite recent global and government efforts to promote the freedom of women to participate in sports and to protect their sovereign choices and their lives, they are still subjected to discrimination and continue to be targets of gender-based violence.

Running has undoubtedly been an essential feature of Kenya’s history. However, even with the involvement and achievements of female Kenyan athletes in every Olympics since 1968,  studies of Kenyan sports have focused on men; women’s participation in sports has only just started to generate interest in historical accounts within East Africa Athletics. The impediments and successes of East Africa’s sportswomen have only been sporadically noted and the concept of gender is rarely employed.

Susan Sirma, Sally Barsosio, Tegla Loroupe, Pamela Jelimo, Susan Chepkemei, Hellen Obiri and Sabina Chebichi have all brought home track and field medals from international competitions. Chebichi’s name came to the fore in 1973, when at a Brooke Bond-sponsored meet in Kericho she won her first race. Nicknamed the “Petticoat Princess” for running barefoot dressed only in a green petticoat, the 14-year-old from Mlimani Primary School near Kitale was given her first kit after winning that race. Chebichi’s wins that year were record-breaking as she recorded some of the fastest times in Africa for 800 metres and 1,500 meters. Chebichi also won the bronze medal in the 800 meters at the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch, New Zealand, becoming the first female from Kenya to win a medal at the Commonwealth Games. However, she soon dropped out of athletics following a pregnancy.

Women have recorded many achievements in sports despite inadequate support, and deserve more from all stakeholders and from Kenyans in general.  “There is a need for all to celebrate all Kenyan female athletes including Agnes Tirop to whom we are paying tribute today who has always shone on track events and won many medals at the Olympics and other competitions at the international and continental level,” Kenya’s Supreme Court Judge, Njoki Ndung’u said during the memorial of murdered cross-country champion Agnes Tirop.

Northern Kenya’s sporting fortunes

Since Kenya’s independence in 1963, northern Kenya — and especially the northeastern region,  which comprises Mandera, Wajir, and Garissa counties — has “remained silent, almost forgotten” as far as sports and its development are concerned. There is hardly any sport that can be associated with the region because of the various impediments placed in the path of sports and athletics enthusiasts in the region, particularly girls.  

In July 2020, Athletics Kenya acknowledged through its senior vice president Paul Mutwii the “more than enough struggles” that northeastern Kenya has faced, including in pursuing its dreams in athletics, and in sports in general. Girl athletes were almost impossible to find in the region ten years ago despite the right of women and girls to participate in sports having been affirmed in 1979. Like in other historically marginalized parts of the country, various upcoming athletes and their promoters in northern Kenya advise that youth empowerment must include recognizing that mistakes have been made. This would encourage all stakeholders to embrace current and future challenges and forge stakeholder synergies and possibilities for corrective measures. Such measures would include aligning Kenya’s efforts with the global ground-breaking initiatives of various agencies, including UN Women-run projects such as One Win Leads to Another, to empower women and girls in order to achieve regional and gender inclusivity in sports.

There is hardly any sport that can be associated with the region because of the various impediments placed in the path of sports and athletics enthusiasts in the area, particularly girls.

Tellingly, there is not a single training camp in northeastern Kenya. Athletics enthusiasts can only meet at the Northeastern National Polytechnic grounds in Garissa. Athletics Kenya (AK) North-Eastern region chairman, Abdullahi Salat, notes that raising athletics standards in the region is a major challenge and that poor sporting infrastructure has further distanced many budding athletes from the sport as they only depend on the Polytechnic grounds which do not even have a standard track. Climatic conditions in the region have also inhibited the growth of the sports, as it is very difficult for athletes to train during the day because of the heat. As such, it should be made possible for athletes from northern Kenya to train in other cooler regions.

The possibilities

For the residents of Kapsait in Lelan, West Pokot County, news of the birth on 9 May 1973 of another daughter to a local family just like any other in the area would have been no more than the addition of a new sibling to the 24 children of a polygamous Pokot household.

When that young girl later expressed her interest in sports, her polygamous father told her she was “useless”, only fit to herd goats and mind children. He could not suspect that his “useless” child would one day break world records, that together with fellow retired former world record-holders Haile Gebresellasie of Ethiopia, Paula Radcliffe of Britain, and Kenyan distance running legend Paul Tergat, his daughter would be inducted into the New York Road Running Hall of Fame (NYRR). There is no such a hall in West Pokot County or in Kenya.

That child was Tegla Chepkite Loroupe.

When that young girl later expressed her interest in sports, her polygamous father told her she was “useless”, only fit to herd goats and mind children.

Neither her father nor the people of her village had any idea that she would turn out to be a world A-Lister in long-distance track and road races. And so it came to pass that during the course of her life, that child (who first ran barefoot to school and later, symbolically, in several races early in her career, including one 10,000 meter-race a day after the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, explaining to the international media that she had done so “out of a sense of duty to all the people taking her as a bearer of hope in her home country”) became a truly phenomenal woman in many respects.

Social-cultural struggles

Tegla’s decision to pursue her dream in athletics was met with solid resistance from her father and the male members of her family.  “Those days, they don’t reckon much with women because they see sports as men’s affairs, especially in my community. No one was willing to support me except for my mother and late sister who stood by me through it all. I have always been determined and I believe I have something special in me,” she noted.

Like women the world over, Kenyan women and particularly those in northern Kenya, have had to endure social-cultural struggles for decades, especially against patriarchy. Patriarchy has always undermined the involvement of women in athletics, the sort of patriarchy that discourages them from participating in sports and instead directs them to reproductive roles. It is the type that insists on the gender socialization of roles, a practice that continues to exclude many women from meaningful involvement in sports, especially those that yield monetary and other material rewards.

Gendered ‘unfreedoms’

Women in athletics ought to be viewed as indicative of development, freedom, and choice. Amartya Sen’s theory of freedom as “both the primary end and as the principal means”, and as understood in the context of social choices theory, is instructive. In Iten, a small town in Kenya’s Rift Valley, women’s success in running has seen them return home with Olympic medals and prize money totalling more than US$1 million. Their visibility has inspired other women not just to run, but also to set up businesses. These women have seen that their well-being can be improved by making entrepreneurial choices that are outside the roles traditionally assigned to them.

When asked whether she would like her daughter to become a runner, Kathleen Chepkurui’s answer was representative of many responses in Iten. She highlighted what Pamela Jelimo, the first Olympic gold medal winner in Kenya, has accomplished (Jelimo earned over US$1 million on the athletics circuit during her widely publicised four-month streak of victories in Golden League competitions across three continents) saying, “When I saw Pamela Jelimo, I said ‘I will support my children’. They can all be runners – my daughters. So, I would like my daughters to be runners.”

Female athletes have used their income to develop Iten. As Caroline Jeptoo notes, “Female athletes help Iten to grow more…. Building schools, churches. Piping water to those places. And especially helping the needy people in society to pay fees, food … and some many things”.

Kenyan women, and especially those in the northern part of the country, are far less likely to pursue running as a career than men. Several barriers in both formal and informal spheres militate against women’s participation in sports. First, parents in the region are more likely to take boys rather than girls to school, which limits girls’ chances of accessing choice-giving forums. This in turn limits their access to coaching and mentorship services. Second, an uncooperative partner or husband can be a hindrance and, third, poverty and limited resources often restrict women.

“When you love a man with no interest in the sport, you end up declining. The man will tell you to choose between him and sports. Of course, I will choose him,” confesses a female athlete.

Lydia Stephens-Okech, an Alliance Girls High School alumni who was one of three female athletes to represent Kenya when women were first included in the country’s Olympic team at the 1968 Games in Mexico, corroborates the evidence of the tribulations of female athletes. “Some of the problems we faced still impede our female athletes’ advancement today and better ways must be found to help them.”  Stephens-Okech notes that lack of education, sexist male officials and traditional views on marriage remain major stumbling blocks for Kenyan girls aspiring to become athletes.

Goodwill and leadership

Standing barely five feet tall, demure, humble, and unassuming, Tegla Loroupe emerged to become the first African woman to win the New York City Marathon after being initially rejected by Athletics Kenya (AK) because of her small frame.

An encounter with Tegla Loroupe reveals an ordinary Pokot woman, her “super-achiever” status not immediately apparent, yet she is royalty in the world of athletics. Tegla is a member of Champions for Peace, a group of 54 famous elite athletes committed to serving peace in the world through sport with the support of Peace and Sport, a Monaco-based international organization. Tegla was named United Nations Ambassador of Sport in 2006 and is also an Ambassador for the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) and UNICEF.

“When you love a man with no interest in the sport, you end up declining. The man will tell you to choose between him and sports.”

Tegla was Kenyan Sports Personality of the Year in 2007 and in the same year became Oxfam Ambassador of Sport and Peace in Darfur together with Elias Figueroa, Katrina Webb, George Clooney, Joey Cheek and Don Cheadle. Tegla maintains good friendships with Prince Albert of Monaco and Thomas Bach, the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

If leadership is a position of influence that enables a person to motivate, inspire, and to set the direction for the purpose of achieving certain goals, then Tegla Loroupe, Catherine Ndereba, and Hellen Obiri, amongst other outstanding Kenyan female athletes, fit the bill.

While research reveals the important roles women play as agents of change, Kenya exhibits a markedly low representation of women in sports leadership. It is as if Kenya supports the views of some of the founding fathers of the modern Olympics games, who denied women participation in sports. Baron de Coubertin, for instance, envisioned the modern Olympic Games as a celebration of masculinity, saying, “Women’s proper place was in the stands as appreciative observers and not participants”.

This low representation suggests a society with pre-set gender roles that perpetuate male hegemony in sports leadership. Such low representation can be attributed to several factors that may be historical, social, organizational, and political. They  include the perception of women as frail and inferior, male masculinity and dominance, cultural beliefs and gender stereotypes, feminine modesty, lack of institutional support, gender role expectations, work-family balance, lack of a social network and role models, lack of education and experience and organizational structures that inadvertently promote men over women. Generally, in Kenya, the entrenched and unchanging organizational cultures that favour male leadership are the major impediments to women’s progress into spheres leadership.

It is as if Kenya supports the views of some of the founding fathers of the modern Olympics games, who denied women participation in sports.

If any efforts have been made in Kenya to institute inclusivity in sports, the progress of women into leadership roles has been slow at best. It was, however, refreshing to see Catherine Ndereba lead the Gender, Welfare and Equality Committee in Sports. President Uhuru Kenyatta had directed that the committee dedicate itself to analysing “women inclusion in teams and federations’ management, existing challenges and opportunities for corrective improvement.” Among other things, the committee recommended stringent action against perpetrators of Gender-Based Violence (GVB).

It is hoped that the recently launched Trailblazer Programme of the State Department for Gender will meet its objective of facilitating women pioneers and icons to play a role in mentoring the youth. Rose Said Rutin, a family counselor and Director of Praise Celebrations, a Christian worship movement in Nairobi says, “All stakeholders, including state departments must work together to cast aside the constraints that have hemmed female athletes in … we must deal with a society in which honest merit is held back, a talent passed over and patriarchy arrogantly allowed to usurp the prerogatives of all. Let the cynic ask by what right we condemn it all. We condemn it at the altar of conscience, equity, and democracy”. Rutin adds, “Our women athletes have been carrying the sedan chair for others. They should sit on the sedan chairs themselves.”  For Rutin, athletes like Tegla Loroupe, Catherine Ndereba, Brigid Koskei, and Hellen Obiri have what it takes to ensure that women athletes are treated with dignity and are allowed the freedom to play their meaningful roles in society.

Sports for peace and development

While it might be the case that Tegla followed her dharma as a long-distance runner, she aligned herself with the needs of her context and society. Sports were not entirely her end but a means to serve humanity, a way station, not a destination. “For me, sport is not just about competing and winning or achieving fame and glory. Rather, I see sport as a worthy platform that can help unite the world, bring peace where there is war and help foster the spirit of brotherliness.” Tegla explains her involvement with Sport for Development and Peace (SDP), saying that it is an intentional use of sport, physical activity and play to attain specific development and peace objectives.

But way before the 5 May 2010 Inaugural Plenary Session of the United Nations that approved the Sport for Development and Peace International Working Group (SDP IWG), Tegla Loroupe had started using sports to effect social change in communities, having established the Tegla Loroupe Peace Foundation (TLPF) in 2003, whose aim was to put an end to the conflict between Kenya’s pastoralist communities. The foundation’s mission is based on three pillars: peacebuilding, education and supporting refugee athletes.  From 2003 to date, the Foundation has sponsored a series of annual Peace Marathons dubbed “Peace through Sports”. With the support of Prince Albert of Monaco, Tegla has also established the Kapenguria Peace Academy that takes in children from conflict areas in East Africa.

While it might be the case that Tegla followed her dharma as a long-distance runner, she aligned herself with the needs of her context and society.

Tegla was named the 2016 United Nations Person of the Year and in the same year was featured in the Olympians for Life exhibition for her work in promoting peace. Tegla was also the Chef de Mission of the Refugee Team, leading the first Refugee Olympic Team to the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio to “remind the world of the sufferings and perseverance of millions of refugees around the world.”

Using sports as a tool to bring about social transformation in relation to conflicts, education, health, and the plight of refugees has elevated Tegla’s standing in Kenya, in the region, and globally, and brought her accolades. A unique woman who originates from a society in which men may themselves be the instigators and prosecutors of conflict and war, her effectiveness and that of fellow elite athletes is increasingly becoming a subject area for social movement theorists. It has been noted that their mobilization of resources, the pursuit of political opportunities, and devising a collective action frame have been possible not just because of the extant positioning of the athletes in the impacted communities, the active involvement in and personal investment of the athletes in the outcome of the peace-promoting activities, but also because of the unique Olympic ethos driving their action.

Tegla and others like her are described as “social movement entrepreneurs”. They do not just appear as mere “evangelists” who only demonstrate their solidarity with a cause by their “presence” at an event but act as businesspeople who must see results; as others “preach with their occasional presence”, they do more.

Rodney faced racism when he arrived in London to pursue his doctorate in African history at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1963. Although he had graduated with a first-class degree at UWI (University of the West Indies), SOAS almost forced him to take admission exams. If Rodney were a white English man, he wouldn’t have had to justify himself. But he was a black man from the colonies and therefore British society saw him as inferior. Yet he felt privileged compared to his friends and his older brother who had migrated to England to seek work—they faced the brunt of job and housing discrimination. The resistance of black people in Britain to racism fascinated Rodney. He spent much of his free time speaking at Hyde Park Corner where West Indians gathered to discuss politics. He talked about racism, Caribbean politics, apartheid and Zimbabwean independence. Rodney was happy to reunite with his girlfriend Patricia, who had left Guyana for Britain to work as a nurse. They had started dating in the summer before Rodney went to university in Jamaica and maintained a long-distance relationship until he arrived in London. Having reunited, the couple deepened their affection for one another and married in 1965.

In England, Rodney aimed to deepen his engagement with Marxism to relate to the black working class. SOAS, however, proved unable to help him with such a task. “There was nobody”, he lamented, “who could be remotely termed a Marxist.” Rodney thought that SOAS, which was founded in 1916 to train British colonial administrators, now educated Africans to serve the interests of Europe. He despised his curriculum and his pretentious professors entrenched in bourgeois ideology. For example, one of his lecturers, the renowned historian John D Fage, argued that the slave trade had benefited West African development, and did no harm to the region’s demographics and economy. Rodney challenged Fage’s defence of the slave trade in his thesis A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800. Although he thought his dissertation showed no strong Marxist scholarship, it was nonetheless the work of a people’s historian. Rodney portrayed pre-colonial West Africa as innovative and culturally refined and countered the narrative of Western scholars that depicted it as primitive. He exposed how European powers disrupted the lives of African people and their societies through the slave trade. Rodney sought to develop this theme in his later work “to upset … the deans of African history in London”.

The British Marxist left of the time made a poor impression on Rodney. He was repelled by the sectarianism of the Communist Party and the different, smaller Trotskyist groups that he came across. They seemed to him more interested in debating amongst themselves than organising workers and defending migrants. He found them old, inarticulate and unprepared. Rodney, moreover, accused the British left of neglecting the fight against racism. He resented the paternalism, the silent and sometimes open racism he encountered from some of them.

Rodney was not the first black activist to be frustrated with the British left. Before him, Claudia Jones, the founder of the Notting Hill Carnival and a member of the Communist Party, had criticised her own party for marginalising anti-racism in the 1950s. But Rodney found solace in a Marxist study group taught by CLR James and his wife Selma. From 1963 to 1966, he and a handful of radical West Indian students visited James’ home in North West London on Friday evenings.

Walter Rodney in 1963.

Rodney saw in CLR James qualities that he admired. James never went to university, yet he was a brilliant Trinidadian Marxist scholar, a prolific writer and a powerful orator. As a black Bolshevik, he placed the liberation of Africans and colonised peoples at the core of his politics. In his earlier Trotskyist days, James led campaigns against Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia before writing his path-breaking Marxist history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, in 1938. Although James had long broken with Trotskyism when Rodney met him in the 1960s, he was still in a class of his own. He had recently returned from Trinidad and Tobago after opposing the despotism of his old friend, Prime Minister Eric Williams, by resigning as editor of his party’s newspaper. James taught Rodney about Marx’s theory of historical change and the Russian Revolution. They read classics such as, Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Lenin’s What Is to Be Done.

From listening to James, Rodney learnt about the revolutionary potential of the working class through its past and present militancy in Europe and abroad. He discovered that exploitation gave workers immense power, as the capitalist relied on their labour-power to make profits—if workers engaged in mass strikes, they could bring the capitalist system to a halt. Rodney also wrote a paper on Marxism and democracy to show what the workers must do to the state in a revolution. Years later, he wrote about the lessons of the Russian Revolution: “The workers could not simply take over a bourgeois parliament and consider the revolution achieved…the bourgeois state had to be destroyed and replaced by institutions which sprang from the working masses.” That’s how well he understood the key concepts of Lenin’s State and Revolution.

Rodney’s understanding of Marxism was also shaped by a world in which the communist parties of the Soviet Union, China and Cuba had conquered state-power and challenged western imperialism. That most Third World nationalist movements and regimes in the 1960s identified with socialism and sometimes called themselves Marxist was no coincidence. They received material and logistical support from the Soviet Union, which hoped to find allies in the Cold War against the United States. Moreover, they looked to the Chinese (1949) and Cuban (1959) revolutions because they appeared to offer a new path to socialism that suited the interest of underdeveloped countries that had a large peasantry and a small working class. The idea that guerrilla struggle in the countryside was essential to achieve national liberation became central to Third World Nationalist ‘Marxism’.

Many on the European left, who opposed the Soviet Union’s bureaucratic oppression of workers and peasants, came to see Mao’s China and Castro’s Cuba as favourable socialist alternatives. Rodney’s mentor CLR James, for instance, supported the workers Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against the Soviet Union and advocated for a proletarian revolution in the advanced western capitalist countries. But he also saw the Cuban Revolution and its strategy of guerrilla warfare as a model for Third World revolutions. Rodney would display a similar ambivalence towards revolutionary strategy as Third World guerrilla intellectuals such as Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, influenced him as much as Marx and Lenin. While he acknowledged the centrality of strikes and workers’ struggles in his later writings on the Russian Revolution, he also believed that guerrilla warfare presented a viable approach to revolutions in the Global South.

Rodney, however, failed to understand why the strategy of guerrilla warfare that the Third World revolutions adopted was incompatible with Marxism, which emphasised revolution through working class self-activity. As guerrilla warfare involved shifting the struggle from the town to the countryside, Third World intellectuals claimed the agent of the revolution was not the urban working class but the peasantry led by commanders from the urban middle class. They had thus revised Marxism and removed it from its proletarian base. Che Guevara saw the working class in underdeveloped countries as a weak and impotent force, while Fanon even claimed it as an obstacle to national liberation because workers benefited from colonialism. The Guinean leader Amilcar Cabral, who directed the guerrilla war against Portugal in Guinea-Bissau with unparalleled success in Africa, had initially attempted to organise the small working class in Bissau. However, he turned to guerrilla struggle after the Portuguese massacre of 50 dockworkers in 1959. Che Guevara continued to pay lip service to the international proletarian revolution and affiliate with Marxism despite his revisions. He wrote: “The peasant class of Latin America, basing itself on the ideology of the working class whose great thinkers discovered the social laws governing us, will provide the great liberating army of the future.”

Guevara forgot that the great thinkers—Marx, Trotsky and Lenin—had argued that the essence of a socialist revolution lies in the self-emancipation of the working class, whereby “the proletariat becomes the subject of history, not the object.” In the absence of the proletariat, the guerrilla wars of the Third World led not to socialism but to bureaucratic one-party regimes that resembled the Soviet Union. The seeds of this failure were obvious in the contradiction in aims within the guerrilla army—the elitist middle-class commanders wanted to rule, while the peasants wanted land. As a result, the middle class mobilised the peasantry to give itself state power, and then exploited and oppressed the masses to bring the nation out of underdevelopment.

Despite its flaws, guerrilla warfare had nonetheless inflicted serious defeats to western imperialism in Africa, Asia and Latin America. By the mid-1960s, it had become the main form of anti-colonial resistance in Portuguese-speaking west and southern Africa. That explains why Rodney, throughout his life, saw this strategy as a high form of politics, convinced that it forced revolutionaries to educate and mobilise the masses. He believed in the redemptive qualities of revolutionary violence that Fanon discussed in his book on anti-colonial struggles, The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon argued that this violence freed the colonised from their inferiority complex and transformed them into proud independent people. Rodney especially saw this transformation occur in the guerrilla liberation movements against Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau. He felt attached to them, as he had witnessed Portuguese dictator Salazar’s repressive fascism when he was conducting his PhD research in Lisbon.

The national liberation movements in the Global South informed Rodney’s ideas on the role of revolutionary intellectuals in the struggle. Rodney was particularly impressed with the Amilcar Cabral. He admired that Cabral had thoroughly analysed the formation of the various classes in his country and based his anti-colonial mobilisation strategy upon the sensitivities of each class towards the colonial state. In his analysis of Guinean society in 1964, Cabral had found that the educated middle class, which he belonged to, could become an elitist and greedy caste that would compromise with the old colonial power to enrich itself. However, he idealistically maintained that this middle class also had the potential to lead the anti-colonial struggle only if it committed “class suicide” to resurrect itself as revolutionary cadres “identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which they belong”. Rodney nevertheless took from Cabral the idea that revolutionary intellectuals must understand the historical reality they seek to transform. They must do away with their elitism, learn from the people and grasp their needs to influence the struggle.

On 5 July 1966, the day Patricia gave birth to their son Shaka, Rodney earned his PhD in African history. He then moved with his family to Tanzania to teach history for one year and meet the Mozambican and Angolan freedom fighters stationed there. But Rodney forged his reputation as a revolutionary when he relocated to Jamaica to lecture at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in January 1968.

–

First published by ROAPE.

Join the Walter Rodney Foundation for the 19th Annual Walter Rodney Symposium on “Walter Rodney: 50 Years of ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,’” which will be held on Saturday, March 26, 2022 (10:00am EST) – click here to register. 

Join Chinedu for the launch of his new book, A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney, on 1 April at Bookmarks Bookshop, London (register here). 

Reading Rethinking Africa – again and again – reminds me of walking into my wild verdant back garden after a night of Cape winter rains. The earth pulsates life, emitting scents that are at once familiar and unfamiliar. With stillness, and deep listening, the overtones of buchu and chamomile, lemon and mint give way to the subtler undertones of wilde als and a myriad wafts of mystery. And in a land where dispossession and loss of land underline Unbelonging and ways of Knowing, a garden is never “just” a garden. Just so, delving into each chapter, each poem feels like a dance between overtones and undertones – the familiar and the unfamiliar. The wisdoms and insights reminiscent of Sunday lunches around the family table and travels across the length and breadth of South Africa in conversation with Elders, the young. It certainly echoes conversations in my head with Neville Alexander on language as a vehicle for cultural identity and imagination, and Robin Wall Kimmerer on the reciprocity of relations between the human and the more-than-human world. There are a myriad of stories about the Land, Belonging and Silence told by poets and writers such as those published in this book, along with many others. Land as in Earth, Human and all the more-than-human world and its interrelationship with the sacred.

Diversity/Multi-vocality

The editors have taken great care in inviting voices that speak the same subject of restoration and reclamation of women’s voices in different tones throughout the book. This nod to a diversity of opinion, of place, of position and of disciplinary roots echoes the thoughts of the editors when they say, “We hold various views reflective of our diversity, and at root we are indigenous, African and feminist, as well as women-centred, or matricentric.” (p. 9 Introduction).This approach to the book can be seen in the use of multiple ways of describing and deploying language as a means to unearth or unmask knowledge systems previously obscured by patriarchal and colonial discourse. The chapters by Muthien, Magoqwana, Bam, Fester-Wicomb rest, in my view, at the core of the book – offering a Lexicon with which to imagine and represent a different way of seeing and knowing Africa. The capital ‘L’ in Lexicon denotes diversity and plurality.

Through the deployment of this Lexicon and the multiplicity and complexity it foregrounds, is called into question the nature of binaries and occlusions that take place in Western thought for the one definition and the obfuscation of differences. The chapters by Vollenhoven and Malotane Henkeman juxtapose different approaches in thinking through or intellectualising about indigeneity and feminisms which traverse sacred and intangible boundaries (in the case of Vollenhoven) and an exploration of transtemporality as means for understanding and navigating trauma in the case of Malotane Henkeman. There is no hierarchy of knowledge and its form here. And as stated by Bernedette Muthien in her chapter 2 – “indigenous is not one village”.

This is transformational indigenous feminism at its writing best.

The schools of thought and scholarly work which all of the authors draw upon continue this honouring of diversities. Indeed, each chapter provides glimpses into libraries and archives often made invisible because of the marginalisation of knowledge systems that fall outside of mainstream academic thinking. Vollenhoven calls on ancestral knowing and visions, Muthien calls on indigenous and African scholars such as Amadiume, Mann, and Clarke among others, Maqoqwana engages with the writings of African American scholars, Bam calls on indigenous knowledge bearers and custodians, archaeologists, interrogating historical narratives about indigeneity through these interviews, Fester-Wicomb uses familial stories and African scholarly work to reinterpret and therefore re-centre mother/grandmother/older woman. The addition of a short chapter by Ana Ligia Leite e Aguiar extends and infers the nature of the interconnectedness and differences of struggles between indigenous peoples across the globe, and in the global South specifically.

Poetics/Poetry 

Perhaps it is the poetics of having multiple languages reflected on the pages of this book that has me responding with my own garden reflections. Words catch in my throat with their familiarity, their evocation or introduction as central to arguments made for re-centring of women. Words and naming such as khoes, taras, ausi, ooMkhulu, rakgadi, ooMama, make reference to the powerful place women had in relation to family and community. The presence still of these ways of naming in contemporary South Africa carry with them deep histories of knowledge systems and power which contradict the patriarchal society created by colonial rule and upheld in the present. Sayings such as inyathi ibuzwa kabaphambili (knowledge is sought from those with wisdom and experience) suggest the layers of meaning and values contained within languages which serve as a vehicle in the transmission of cultural heritage. Powerful arguments are made for academic teaching and research in indigenous languages by Magoqwana and Bam. More than this, the calls for an interrogation of the official Archive, not only in its nomenclature and classification systems, but also in the ways in which meaning has been grafted and continues to be grafted onto material culture disconnected through the persistent “lost in translation” syndrome peculiar to colonisation.

The inclusion of poetry is perhaps one of the most powerful deployments and celebrations of the Imagination as bearer of knowledge and dreams of freedom. The place of poets in the Life of Africa, whether griot, storyteller, imbongi or seer has long held deep time histories, both past and present.

The four poets in the book, Diana Ferrus, Khadija Tracey Heeger, Shelley Barry, and co-editor Bernedette Muthien, offer visions of the past, present and future, dancing within, between and around the scholarly texts and in so doing extending the boundaries between the said and the unsayable, silences and ghosts.

Visual/Envisaged/Imagined

The images of places and indigenous “art” are powerfully illustrative of the journeys and narratives of the contributors, of indigenous women’s lives in all their diversities. They reiterate the complexity of knowledge and meaning making through place making and identity. The images evoke the retrieval work which knowledge and meaning making have on memory landscapes where displacement, erasure and silencing have been brutal.

Ways forward

With this groundbreaking volume, Muthien and Bam have set the tone for the contributions to African indigenous feminist scholarship and creativity still to be developed. May many more books be harvested from this our Home, our Continent.