Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies (2001)
ISSN: 1530-5686
RESPONSES TO DYMPNA UGWU-OJU
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Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies (2001) ISSN: 1530-5686 RESPONSES TO DYMPNA UGWU-OJU |
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Thank you so much for bringing this article to our attention. Dympna Ugwu-Oju is at it again! The Newsweek piece seems to be a follow up on her book, What Will My Mother Say: A Tribal African Girl Comes to Age in America (let me not even comment on her use of the word “tribe”). In What Will my Mother Say... Dympna Ugwu-Oju documents the life stories of three generations of Aku women—her grandmother, mother and herself. The study is rife with the same kind of negative and grossly untrue stereotypes that pervade Dympna’s Newsweek letter. In her book, Ugwu-Oju presents Igboland (in this case Nsukka) as a place “of female circumcision, child brides and patriarchal domination. A place where bride price is paid for a wife, who then walks two steps behind her husband, not permitted to look him in the eye or speak his name.” She ascribes universal subordination to all Igbo women, and presents her American sister-in-law as the espouser of womanhood and feminism, in sharp contrast to her own “weak and timid” Igbo mother.
What Will my Mother Say... was in fact one of the reasons that I decided to write my dissertation on the history of women and gender in the old Nsukka Division. During a Ford Foundation sponsored pre-dissertation fieldwork trip to Nsukka in 1996, I had the honor of interviewing Dympna’s mother, Madam Rose Edoga (the interview took place on November 8). I must say that I was surprised to discover that Madam Edoga was anything but “oppressed.” In fact Madam Edoga was the first woman in all of Aku to build and own a cement house! Madam Edoga further informed me that she owned businesses, land and landed property!
Dympna Ugwu-Oju is certainly entitled to write and interpret her own family history in whatever fashion she sees fit. However when it appears that she has taken advantage of her mother’s illiteracy to represent her in disapproving ways—ways in which her mother does not represent herself—there becomes a problem. And the problem becomes magnified when one takes into account that the group of women that Dympna Ugwu-Oju writes about—Aku women—are the most enterprising of all Nsukka women. So many of them have acquired great wealth through weaving and long distance trading.
Therefore my people, I believe that Dympna is simply doing what she does best, and that is expose gross falsehoods to a western gaze. And her efforts have paid off handsomely, since some so-called western feminists are championing her as the best thing to come out of Igbo women’s/gender studies.
Enough said. I will wait and see what other people think.
Nwando Achebe, PhD.
Institute for the Study of Gender in Africa
University of California, Los Angeles
“Tribe” and its derivatives were coined by Westerners as a label for “primitive” peoples. Thus they talk/write of the “ethnic” (never “tribal”) Serbs. “Tribe” is a relic of the untenable Western hierarchical structuring of humanity, ranging from the “civilized.”
Westerners to the “primitive others.” On this account, Africanists have since moved away from using “tribe” in referring to African peoples, a shift which Dympna Ugwu-Oju has totally missed.
Given their inability to pronounce “Igbo,” the Europeans came up with various corruptions of the word, ranging from “Heebo” to “Ebo.” By early 20th century, they had settled on “Ibo.” Today, only those such as Dympna Ugwu-Oju, walking museums of the European muddling of African languages, still refer to the “Igbo” as “Ibo.”
Dympna Ugwu-Ojo’s essay is so replete with distortions about the Igbo that she is anything but credible. She says that in 1974, when she was 18, she “knew with absolute certainty that [she] would marry the Ibo man [her] family approved for [her]....[she] was, after all, raised within the context of child brides, polygamy, clitoridectomies and arranged marriages.” There has never been “polygamy” among the Igbo. How about polygyny? More substantively, I will refer your readers to Sonia Bleeker’s The Ibo of Biafra, published in 1969. On p. 46, Bleeker, an American anthropologist, wrote: “In the past, [a girl] underwent a type of circumcision called clitoridectomy, but gradually this practice has been abandoned.” On pp. 47/48, she wrote that if, after meeting “at a market or at a dance in the village,” a boy and girl like each other, the marriage negotiations proceed....a girl is never forced into a marriage she does not want, or is a young man forced into a union with a girl whom he does not like.”
Obviously, Dympna Ugwu-Oju has, since 1974 (when she arrived in the United States), been watching a lot of Tarzan-type movies. Tragically, she mistakes the movies for the real world.
Chidiebere Nwaubani
University of Colorado at Boulder, USA
I wish to add something that might be of some interest to the discussion on Dympna Ugwu-Oju. Just a little story.
In Nimo town of Njikoka Local Government Area there is an age-old tradition that allows the women to beat up their men! Yes, I witnessed it, and made further enquiries.
The name for this women is: Inyom Nimo, and could be translated as the “society or group of women of other towns married to Nimo men.” This also involves women from other villages within Nimo that are married outside their village. While at home last December (1999), I suddenly heard the sound of a gong, followed by the voice of a woman shouting: “Inyom Nimo, onye nu’ ya gwa ibe ya.” which means, “Nimo women, she who hears should tell the next person.” She simply continued beating the gong and repeating this statement.
I drew my mother’s attention to the fact that the woman had not yet passed on a definite message that should be conveyed to others. She said the message had been conveyed. As if to confirm her words, lots of women started trouping down the path the messenger had taken.
The long and short of it was that the women were being called to come and beat up a man that had been mishandling the wife for some time. On such occasions no man goes to assist the particular man whose house is besieged.
Unfortunately, the man that had this December visit simply ran away, even though he was a wealthy man. The women came back and started making other plans. I could not stay back to know how it finally ended.
This happening was for me a demonstration of the fact that women could take care of themselves if they want. I am sure such women’s societies are to be found in different parts of Igboland. When I think of my getting to know this only as late as last year, I am not surprised to read about Ugwu-Oju’s write up. Maybe she needs to go home from time to time.
Chinedu Uchechukwu
Otto-Friederich Universität
Bamberg, Germany
Thank you for bringing up this matter. You may like to know that we also had a similar women’s tradition in my town, Umueze II, Ehime-Mbano. I think it was the “Umuada” - daughters married outside the community - who would come home to humiliate (What was it called?) their brothers who are proven to be abusive to their wives. I know that it was in force in my childhood days. I don’t know what became of it. I have even forgotten what it was called. I would be glad if someone can refresh my memory on this.
I wish that some of our feminist scholars could use such materials to make contribution to international feminist discourse instead of parroting Western paradigms. I also wish that all of us could make effort to read Dympna’s book and essays a bit more critically and enter into constructive debate with her and, if possible, invite her to present a paper in a special session in Houston next year.
I don’t know who Dympna is, but I believe that she has something to say. She is one of our own and if she feels very strongly about her convictions, we should [not] be expending energies unnecessarily through antagonistic scholarship. Then we would end up alienating her and transforming her into a professional rebel. My studies in psychoanalytic theory teaches me that the only way to tame the hysterical or the psychotic subject (i.e. the speaking subject) is by offering it a couch to lie back and talk - just talk until the spirit is free of all conflictual (or, in another sense, demonic) possessions! Being an exile, as Dympna and all of us are, is a necessary precondition in becoming a psychotic subject. With time we shall begin to discover that we are not very different from Dympna and we shall find everything at home questionable.
I suggest that we save our fire for other urgent purposes - like Obasanjo’s recent massacres in Okigwe! The enemy is an outsider in Abuja and the name is not Dympna! I realize I am shooting from a double-barrelled gun, but the bullets are both clearly targeted and none is a stray.
Obiwu
Department of English
Syracuse University, New York
Copyright 2001 Africa Resource Center, Inc.
Citation Format
, (2001). RESPONSES TO DYMPNA UGWU-OJU. Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: 1, 1.