This research brings us new understanding about the deeper history of gendered power in northern Mozambique. It also opens new routes in the theoretical thinking as well as the methodologies of African gender history.
The following three article manuscripts (two in review and one delayed by COVID-19 but underway) are the culmination of this research and highlight the progress that this project has made beyond the state of art:
Taking ‘voice’ as its analytical focus, Article 1 explores the gendered history of women’s spiritual and political power in northern Mozambique. Methodologically, it bridges the study of oral traditions and oral history. Through an analysis of the relation between past and present voices, I explore a deeper past in which male spiritual-political leadership was not the norm and also women spoke with authority. Moreover, by studying the ways that the relationship between the deeper past and the present is performed in the oral history encounters, we gain a better understanding of the changing shape of gendered authority in northern Mozambique.
Article 2 focuses on the gendered practices of history telling, and how these practices shape historical narratives of gendered power. More specifically, I seek to deconstruct the ‘male mythologies’ that have thus far underpinned understandings of this history. Focusing on oral historical narratives of women of authority, I explore how male elders talk about masculinity and how masculinity in turn shapes the narratives they tell. This analysis, moreover, helps to critically re-evaluate the early written sources and make visible the different and competing ways that masculinity shapes the various ideas of gendered power, also showing how these ideas about masculinity are part of historical processes of change.
Article 3 explores the gendered temporalities of history. It challenges the linear temporal models that underpin much research on gender in African history. Analytically, I focus on the temporal gesturing that takes place in oral history telling, and the ways that the time of our lives (or lived time) and deeper time (or the times of our ancestors) intertwine and interact in these narrative events. This brings together the study of gender in Africa’s deeper pasts in dialogue with a cultural analysis of the contemporary historical moment. Combining the study of the contemporary historical moment with the study of the deeper past, as I argue, allows us to better capture the multiplicity of gendered times.
The international workshop (‘Rethinking Time and Gender in African History’), rescheduled to 24–25 March 2022 due to the pandemic, promises to open further new routes by bringing together researchers working on gender history in different temporal and geographical contexts in Africa to discuss and collaboratively rethink methodologies. Keep an eye for the special issue also!
Finally, preparations for a research-based online oral history exhibit on the history of women, gender, and power in northern Mozambique are in progress.
