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Considered the basic articles of Anne Nasimiyu-Wasike (The missing voices of women) and Orabator Agbonkhianmeghe (The backbone of the Church or Gender Rhetoric).

***Anne: In the Middle Ages, Women were valued as economic commodities, functionaries for childbearing and manual labor.

***She shows inequalities within the Kenyan inheritance rights whereby in patriarchal societies, male children are favored over female children. Male children dominate these systems while female children experience subordination. Still, the generational lineage of children is traced from the father. Even in matriarchal societies, where lineage is maternally traced, men make decisions. So women have no voice in the community, every aspect of life is given a male interpretation.

***Anne argues that African Socio-Religio-cultural practices support violence against women and ignore the collective voice of the people. So the functioning of the community is lacking.

*** Orobator answers: In the second article, although he believes that Christianity should learn from the African Religion on the question of women‘s roles and responsibilities, he recognizes an ecclesiological challenge on one hand, whereby the church needs to create more space so that women feel particularly at home, make their voices and leaderships gifts be welcomed, while on the other hand, the 2nd African synod in 2009 affirms the church as a family. In this sense, the dignity, talents, competences and inimitable quality of the gifts of the family are equally for all people of God irrespective of gender. A functional family gives birth to a functional community.

*** We find this in agreement with Anne-Marie Slaughter‘s family idea.

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Anne-Marie Slaughter: Can we all "have it all"?

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Virtues developed in a Family Relax Inequalities

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Virtues developed in a Family Relax Inequalities

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***To inequalities/challenges/extremes, Joseph Selling offers a cultivation of good dispositions/virtues.

***He tries to equip a person with a sense of what is „appropriate“ as the middle term between two extremes (inequalities).

***For him, virtues ought to be learned as good dispositions/attitudes (learned or appropriated ways of assessing ethical situations), since they are not universally applicable,but suitable within a cultural community and translate these virtuous attitudes to concrete cases.

***Virtues ought to address specific inequalities through instructions, narrations, and providing role models to be imitated. It’s through this process that „good dispositions“ are instilled and personalities shaped.

***Virtues should reveal kinds of situations that our specific „Cultural Traditions“ have considered important or challenging to warrant the development of a particular good disposition/attitude/habitual tendency.Virtues should point to challenges that can be sorted ethically.

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***The 2nd African synod in 2009 affirms the church as the family.
***An African family is the basic platform for the cultivation of virtues.

***So our different cultural challenges or states of affairs on gender issues demand us a specific response of ethical virtues to relax these particular inequalities.
*** Virtues in Africa maybe taught or discovered in intentioned stories or narratives to aid a gender equilibrium for the new generations.

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***We look at indirectly practiced virtues in the African systems of living so we can pursue the ethics of gender equality.

***Critics mostly surround:

*Women in leadership and authority

*Women‘s work burdens and gender relations of production and consumption

*Generalization about Africa women for instance: „ African women do this“ or „ The women of Africa think that“ (Cornwall, A. Introduction: Perspectives on Gender in Africa, in: Readings in Gender in Africa, Cornwall A (ed), Bloomington, Indianapolis, Exford, James Currey, 2005, pp, 2-3).

***Modern women challenge assumptions that have pervaded scholarships on gender in Africa and urge caution about the dangers of reading African worlds through western eyes (Cornwall, 2005, p.3).

***Oyeronke argues that gender as it’s understood in western feminist discourse didn’t exist in Africa prior to the colonial imposition of a dichotomous model of sexual difference, rendering women subordinate and inferior to

Men (Oyeronke,O. The invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

***Therefore, we need to correct an ironic distortion brought about by Western feminist representation of African women as downtrodden. For an african woman, she makes part of the family like the man does.

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***Women have prominent roles of spirit possession cults in the interlacustrine region of East Africa (Berger I. Rebels or Status-Seekers? Women as Spirit Mediums in East Africa: in Women in Africa, E. G. N. J. Hafkin (ed), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1976, pp. 148-155) and are regarded as great healers (Ngubane, H. Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine: An Ethnography of Health and Disease in Nyuswa-Zulu Thought and Practice, London, Academic, 1977).

***„My father was also a devotee of a good, AWUNURO, whose chief minister was a woman. She conducted worship, led rituals, and officiated at the rites, although the majority of her community of worshipers were men. No one ever raised gender based consideration to protest her principal role as leader and priestess. For all the reproach directed at African cultural practices and the treatment of women, the spiritual tradition of the continent create equal space for women to practice in their right“ (Orobator, p. 149).

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Great Leaders and decision makers in moral life

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Great Leaders and decision makers in moral life

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***Leaders: In political offices in Rwanda, the greater representation of women clears a path for a significant involvement in unadulterated democracy (Burn,J. E. Gender Balance and the meanings of Women in Governance in Post-Genocide Rwanda, in: African Affairs, 107 (428), 2008, pp. 361-386).

***Decision makers: Three previous/current women speakers of parliament, Anne Makinda of Tanzania, Rebecca Kadaga of Uganda, Donatille Mukabalisa of Rwanda. In 2015, Rwandan women parliamentarians ranked 63.3%.In 2019, Women made up 62 % of Rwanda’s national legislature, far more, than any other country.(www.nationalgeographic.com)

***Heroic Women: Sex and marriage Instructors. E.g. Swahili Weddings in Tanzania and Kenya.There’s an equal representation of women in the Swahili-Islamic authoritative positions  (Thompson, K. D. How to be a good Muslim Wife: Women‘s Performance of Islamic Authority during Weddings, in: Journal of Religion in Africa, 41 (4),2011, pp.  427-445).

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***Christian Communities refashioned women’s identities, associating motherhood ever more closely with the role of the dependent domestic wife( Gaitskell, D. Devout Domesticity? A Century of African Women’s Christianity in South Africa: In Women and Gender in South Africa to 1945, London, James Currey, 1990).

***(Okeyo, 1980 and Mutemba, 1982) argue that colonialists undermined and discouraged women opportunities (no registering personal income accounts with trade unions). Colonialists dictated on what each sex had to concentrate on.

***For Karimojongs of Uganda, women focus on home production and reproduction(care givers), while men focus on security and livestock production as breadwinners (Agade Mkutu, K. Uganda: Pastoral Conflict & Gender Relations, in: Review of African Political Economy, 35 (116), 2008, pp. 237-254).

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An African value System works towards a Functioning virtuous Family/Community.

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An African value System works towards a Functioning virtuous Family/Community.

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***„Gender Equality implies that the interests, needs and priorities of both women and men are taken into consideration -recognizing the diversity of different groups of women and men. Gender equality is not a ‚woman‘s issue‘ but should concern and fully engage men as well as women.“(Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women, OSAGI, August 2001, Fact sheet 1).

*** We need a justly FUNCTIONING moral community, where we don’t need to make the position of women the central point, but the whole family (a nucleus of the society) as one,where each member is a contributor as a breadwinner or caregiver. For the African perspective, and basing on lived realities of life, if we are to cultivate a virtuous community, communal gender issues ought not to be a women issue but rather engage men and women alike and fully.

***The African woman and man fully participate centrally in this family and the family creates an atmosphere for all to execute different competences and gifts through various roles as breadwinners or caregivers within a functioning community. It may not make any sense to get rid of women in the African context who are the primary caregivers and custodians of families. African theological ethics without women would be dead!

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No value system that oppresses its Members 

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No value system that oppresses its Members 

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***“No cultural value worth the name permits or promotes the oppression of and enslavement of women. No cultural value permits women to go without education or healthcare, including sexual and reproductive health. No cultural value permits women’s behavior to be standard of cultural expression, while men behave as they please. No cultural value entitles a man to hide behind his sister’s honor, while attacks other men’s sisters. No cultural value holds women upto veneration as mothers while exposing them to death and disability in childbirth. These are not cultural values of human values -these are the means by which one group of people holds and uses power over another.”

Dr. Mafia Sadik, former Executive Director of UNFPA, a special adviser to the UN Secretary-General and special  Envoy to HIV/AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (Religion, women’s Health and Rights, UNFPA, 2016).

***The inner life of the african value system has a virtuos solution that relaxes the extremes. There shouldn’t be any gender issue per se  because the cultural value System looks at a mother and the father as either breadwinners or caregivers, without any discrimination,  they are both contributors to the life of the family and the community at large as each plays a certain card of the game successfully. Strong influential women and men have been the products of this system. Unless of recent when gender specifications from the West are laudable, divorces haven been uncommon !