Gender and Knowledge Production in Africa

Oyeyemi Modupeola , Mohammed VI Polytechnic University

April 2, 2026

UM6P Campus – Benguerir

The next seminar will be given on April 2, by Oyeyemi Modupeola, a second year PhD candidate at the Center for African Studies, UM6P Benguerir. Her research focuses on West African Literature and African Women’s studies.

This seminar examines how knowledge about Africa has been produced, contested, and transformed through the lens of gender. Beginning with V.Y. Mudimbe’s concept of the “colonial library,” the talk traces how colonial anthropology constructed Africa as an object of knowledge within Western epistemological frameworks and how gender became one of the central organizing principles of that construction. Victorian assumptions about family, sexuality, and female subordination were projected onto African societies, erasing complex indigenous gender systems and entrenching new forms of male authority through codified customary law.

The talk then turns to the decisive intervention of African feminists who challenged both the colonial legacy and the universalizing tendencies of Western feminism, arguing that African women must theorize their own realities on their own terms.