African Women Through Western Eyes

Abstract

This chapter discusses Western perspectives on women of African descent. Western scholarship has tended to be patronising and essentialising in the manner it depicts women from Africa. This otherness of African women is characterised by the presumed inferiority, poverty, docility, passivity, dependency, illiteracy, traditionalism, domestic bound, powerlessness, subjugation, and lack of intelligence. The chapter traces the dark continent and otherness narratives back to the beginnings of Western civilisation before discussing the 14th-17th century European travellers' ambivalent and largely negative narratives of African women. The travellers considered female bodies of Africans uncivilised and unable to fully conform to the socioeconomic and political environment of the civilised West. The chapter discusses sexual exploitation of African women through rape- and systems of concubinage during colonialism. The Black female form was associated with many destructive stereotypes, claiming her to be sexually deviant, primitive, subhuman, hypersexual, and an uncontrollably erotic creature.