GUJARAT NATIONAL LAW UNIVERSITY

LEGAL ENGLISH PROJECT

THE WOMANISM OF CHIKWENYE OKONJO OGUNYEMI.

SUBMITTED TO
PRATIMA DUBE
(ASST. PROF. OF ENGLISH)
GNLU

SUBMITTED BY
NAME: Rishabh Manihar
SEM.: 2ND SEM.
BATCH: 2017-22
REGISTRATION NO.: 17B126
EMAIL ID.:rishabhm025@gmail.com

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 AKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would acknowledge my indebtness to English professor Pratima

Dube who is a source of continuous guidance and inspiration to me
and for taking in organizing, designing and completing this project. I
am also obliged to Gujrat National Law University for providing
library and technical facilities.

TABLE OF CONTENT

S.NO. PARTICULARS PAGE NO.

1. INTRODUCTION 3.
2. SITUATION OF WOMEN IN 3-4.
EARLY PHASE OF CENTURY
3. SITUATION OF WOMEN IN LATE 4.
HALF OF CENTURY
4. APPROCHES OF WALKER AND 4-5.
CHIKWENYE
5. CONCLUSION 5.

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 INTRODUCTION
The impact of womanism went beyond USA to African continent due to many critics but
Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi. in the 1980s Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi came up with a
concept/terminology, womanism, that she argued was more appropriate than feminism to
describe African women’s engagement in social transformation.1 It mainly differs from the
feminism concept by the including the racial, cultural, national, economic and political
dimensions in her works. Yet she observed that “a womanisit is not separatist, more so
female separatist.”2 She provided the different woman perspectives within the legitimate area
which primarily based on the survival, affirmation and empowerment. Black womanism is a
philosophy that celebrates black roots, the ideals of black life, while giving a balanced
presentation of black womandom.3 She came up with this idea by aiming at the unity and self
healing that particular person saw in the positivistic manner. She observed that how particular
women showed in the antipatriarchal society. The book's purpose is not so much the
achievement of that feminist goal but the integration of the Ruths into the black world-a
womanist objective.4 However she created the connection between black america and black
Africa.

SITUATION OF WOMEN IN EARLY PHASE OF CENTURY

She told about the condition of society how women treated at that time by giving the example
of girl named Jaqueline how she understands that her illness is psychosomatic and she
becomes reintegrated into society. I describe how African feminists lay the foundation for
approaching a text ‘genuinely’ by deliveating some of the African cultures that distinguish
Africans from the rest of the world or from other ‘feminisms.5 According to Chikwenye
Ogunyemi, African American womanism overlooks African peculiarities. Areas which are
relevant for Africans but which Blacks in America cannot deal with include extreme poverty,
in-law problems, older women oppressing younger women, women oppressing their co-
wives, or men oppressing their wives.6 It told us about how a particular woman who excellent
in all the fields but people in Africa didn’t recognised her talent and so she had to destroy the

1
https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/african-
feminisms last accessed on 22nd March, 2018.
2
http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in last accessed on 22nd March, 2018.
3
Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English, Chikwenye Okonjo
Ogunyemi, Vol.11, No. 1 (Autumn, 1965) 63-80, Chicago press.
4
Karen C. Gasten, “Women in the Lives of Grange Copeland,” CLA Journal24, no.3 (March 1981): 276-86.
5
Politics of the Family in Contemporary East and West African Women’s Writing, Yunusy Castory Ng’umbi
6
Arndt, Susan, “African Gender Trouble and African Womanism: An Interview with Chikwenye Ogunyemi and
Wangari Muthoni,” Signs 25, no.3, (2000), 714-715.

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same. The political appearance of black women also came into existence when Sissie had
successfully represented black womanhood at the global level and she gave motivation to
others to do the same thing at the world level but this motivation was only to black man. This
example tells us about the women empowerment during that time. How situation gradually
became changing after massive racialism and gender inequality for the unprecedented amount
of years. The societal condition of women of Akan and Fulani is highly patriarchal in the
nature and this can be acted as the source for the womanist novel. Similarly, ostracism and
ethnicism rather than sexism cause the development of the strong woman in Head's maru.

SITUATION OF WOMEN IN LATE HALF OF CENTURY

In this era women tried to practice the activity that was carried out by their predecessors
without any specific relation to gender. She has at times endeavoured to put herself on
commonplace ground by intertwining the comfortable oral convention with the outside
composed medium, while likewise assuming the part customarily held for lady: edifying and
engaging the populace left in her care. The works of art of the female Afro-American novel
came after the prime of the dissent custom and underestimated the ideological sponsorship of
the black power movement. Thus, female authors in the two mainlands like to recount life as
it is, at times of life as it is believed to be, and once in a while of life as it should be.
It helps her to rediscover the simplicity, relative intimacy and candor. One unmistakable
example in the gigantic knit, carefully sewed together, demonstrates the dark lady's
improvement from bondage to a few type of liberation from both white and dark male centric
society. But Both Alice Walker and Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, as novelists, suggested
Womanism as a distinctive praxis for gathering and narrating spheres of knowledge about the
lives of black women.7

APPORACHES OF WALKER AND CHIKWENYE

The approach of Alice Walker is slightly different from her because she took up the inventive
approach, she took up the woman who is shy in nature but the hardworking and pitted against
the terrible fate, her character always filled with the sexism, poverty and racism. "But woman
is not called upon to build a better world: her domain is fixed and she has only to keep up the

7
Womanist Theology and Epistemology in the Postmodern U.S. Context. In D. Hopkins & M. Lewis (Eds.),
Another World is Possible: Spiritualities and Religions of Global Darker Peoples (pp. 307-312). Acumen
Publishing.

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never ending struggle against the evil principles that creep into it; in her war against dust,
stains, mud, and dirt she is fighting sin, wrestling with Satan."8

CONCLUSION
By the way of her article she insists that the womanist visison is used as answer to all query
related to equitable share of power among all the groups including the racial etnnic group and
sexism related group. It looks at scholars who served as catalysts for nurturing womanist
thought, including Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi and Clenora Hudson-Weems.9 Even if she
claimed that she arrived this juncture without overlapping the work of alice walker’s work on
womanism but it is not the real case. In fact there is overlap between the two ideologies.
Rather than citing gender inequality as the source of Black oppression, Ogunyemi takes a
separatist stance much like Hudson-Weems, and dismisses the possibility of reconciliation of
white feminists and black feminists on the grounds of the intractability of racism. 10 Even
though she used the perfect and persuasive examples but they are few in numbers which talks
about the how feminist write about the blackness and difference between about the racial
components. Apart from that there was lack of example which talks about the African
blackness specifically to make the salient need for necessity of African conception of women.

They used the tool of blackness without forwarding the ideas related to blackcness. There is
no relation between the tool and values that they wanted to create in women at that era. The
thought of her related to western womanism which would work in African nation was wholly
impractical because there is difference between both the cultures and their norms. This work
had already done by the many authors earlier and it was not new concept. The African
women had already done all these aspects of western womanism. It is also noteworthy that
her work on womanism has relation to Walker’s and Hudson Weems’ conceptions. Walker’ s
approach is different because she tried to make conceptions about the men and their
dangerous impact on the society while chikwenye’s work on the womanism is completely
from the point of view of women and tried to say that how women can do on her own will in
male dominant society.

8
De Beauvoir (The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972], (pp. 470-71.)
9
http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com last accessed on 22 nd March, 2018.
10
Maparyan, Layli (2012). The Womanist Idea. New York, New York: Taylor & Francis.