Introduction

Womanhood has been widely discussed across disciplines and eras; however, an analysis of womanhood from an African writer’s perspective is quite hard to come by due to the traditional African perception of women as belonging to a lower social class than males. While there have been times when women held positions that were considered barred only to them, women are still relegated in many African cultural settings to an inferior class status. This part of the book explores how Emmanuel Babatunde, the author of the memoir (Kelebogile—I Am Grateful: An African Journey through Celibate Priesthood to Married Life) being analyzed in this chapter, broadly embarks on documenting the lives and travails of women dominated by both isolated and collective acts of male chauvinism in African societies. It highlights key moments where each of these women, including the memoirist’s wife and mother, challenged these traditions and attempted to shift the dominant understanding of womanhood in African societies.

The African Negative Perception of the Witch

In many African societies, the strict adherence to culture and traditional ways of doing things can specifically rub women unfavorably, indicating the need for such change.

The book, Kelebogile, perfectly captures the age-old tradition of relegating African women to a lesser social status. The title of the book takes the name of the author’s wife, a Batswana woman he met during his academic sojourn to the United States. Kelebogile starts with a discussion about the prevalent conception of gender in the typical African communities yet to tap into the influence of European tenets and civilizations. Born to a Yoruba family, Babatunde focuses on the social status of the woman in the Yoruba cultural setting, such as the difference between the gendered use of the pejorative term “witch” in contrast to its more positive gender counterpart “wizard.”

Like many other African cultures, the male-dominated Yoruba culture takes pride in validating the existence of covert women associations that operate in the extraterrestrial world, and these women are referred to as witches. Despite this denigration, the witch role is one of the earliest known roles in which women held a superior status to other women in traditional African societies relative to men.