Women, gender, and knowledge production in anglophone Africa and its diaspora

Abstract

This chapter describes and analyzes how the imposition of Western Anglophone education was negotiated both on the continent and in its Diaspora. While this chapter deals only with Anglophone education, it may be argued that negotiated education was experienced wherever Africa was colonized. One major result of colonization was the imposition of aWestern gendered perspective that ultimately challenged and often transformed African ethno-national gender identities via Western education's structures and curriculum that contradicted or dismissed altogether Indigenous gendered knowledge and associated gender roles within these ethno-nations. Ethno-nation or ethno-national is identified as African civilizations' unique societal attributes as documented through their cultural, economic, educational, government/political, language, and religious institutions. This chapter highlights primarily three African ethno-nations' interactions with Western Anglophone education and the range of impacts on Africa and its Diaspora's female identity formation. These ethno-nations, Akan, primarily located in Ghana, and Igbo and Yoruba, primarily located in Nigeria, all have significant populations located in the Diaspora nation-state of Jamaica. Ethnographic studies from 1991 through 2015 are presented to discuss the complexity of the historical and ongoing gendered negotiation process in Western Anglophone education models. The results are a push-pull effect as each ethno-nation during the colonial and later neocolonial contexts experienced incidents of gendered resistance, adaptation, and transformation in response to the everincreasing participation inWestern Anglophone education models and its accompanying curricula.