Gender Time, Gendered Time: In Parts of Africa

Abstract

Over the long term, Africans socially constructed time and gender through struggle and invention, the stuff of history. But to get at this broad salience we must toggle between scales of region and period, among different kinds of evidence, and among themes such as agriculture, statecraft, and political economy. The story of time and gender told here moves from a distant past into the present, with a focus on the people of an East African inland sea commonly referred to as ‘Lake Victoria’. It takes up African language vocabulary, then oral texts, then social practice. The ideas, aspirations, and struggles of Africans drive each step in the journey. They limit the effects of Global North academic ideas about gender and time in Africa’s past and present, revealing new facets of both categories.

Keywords

• time
• gender
• Bantu languages
• oral textuality
• sex