Introduction
Human rights’ global relevance and legitimacy can and must be strengthened by grounding the development and interpretation of human rights standards in grassroots experiences.[1]
This piece seeks to amplify the voices of African women whose empowerment strategies fall outside the human rights paradigm. It aims to address the epistemic injustice resulting from their marginalization and raises questions about the current human rights framework’s capacity to accommodate cultural and religious diversity, particularly concerning empowering approaches to gender relations.
The intention is not to promote gender complementarity within marriage. Numerous abusive situations stem from non-egalitarian approaches to gender relations. The objective is to document these women’s experiences, and through their eyes, assess to what extent gender complementarity can be harnessed as an empowering cultural and spiritual framework.
Rethinking empowerment: voices from Kinshasa.
“Unfortunately, we are not allowed to express ourselves as Africans. My man, yes, he is the head of the household. That is very good. But I also have my share of responsibility. And when each person plays their role well, you see a home where the couple is well-adjusted. I do not like and have excluded the terms superiority and inferiority… I have mentioned the concept of complementarity because, in Africa, men and women complement each other. So it is normal to respect one another…it is complementarity that creates harmony and balance in a relationship”.
BM is a twenty-four-year-old trainee lawyer. She is among the highly educated, professionally active women born and raised in Kinshasa whom I had the privilege to interview.
While BM wholeheartedly agreed with men being the heads of their households, she warned against giving them excessive power. In her view, men and women have specific roles to fill. She emphasised that, in that sense, women are leaders in their own capacity. She used the phrases protect, provide, and give an orientation to describe the husband’s role. The words support, encourage, and reinforce were used about wives. I brought this to her attention, and she confirmed that these words reflect her views on healthy dynamics within a couple. She then added the word strength to describe what is expected of a man.
SKE, a twenty-seven-year-old Pentecostal Christian and IT specialist shared BM’s sentiments. As our conversation progressed, it became clear that she was exasperated. Yet, her frustration seemed to be related to what she perceived as poor leadership by men, not to the position culturally assigned to them: “Today’s men, they are like women”, she said. “ They do not know what responsibility is… in a couple. He thinks being the head of the family is going to work, bringing money home, and having food cooked and put on the table for you…No, no… you have responsibilities…For example… you have to protect your wife from outside opinions, you are the man, you have to do this. When you see an obscure and confusing situation, you are the one who has to make a decision because it is your family, your children…A leader is someone who has to show the way, you have to be calm when faced with a problem, you have to find a solution…” When asked, she confirmed she would happily stand behind a man who fits her view of a competent leader.
SKE’s religious affiliation was deliberately mentioned: like in many other places on the continent, Congolese culture and society are profoundly influenced by metaphysical worldviews.[2] Indeed, the sacredness of these beliefs and their influence on the interviewees’ worldviews became apparent while discussing healthy family dynamics.
Consider PB as a case in point. She is twenty-four years old, a Pentecostal Christian, and a trainee lawyer. PB believes that the Bible establishes the man as the head of the household and the woman as a companion and helper. She compared this family organization to a company where a boss has an assistant. She mentioned that both Congolese society and law reflect those biblical principles, which she does not view as interfering with women’s freedom. In fact, PB emphasized that husbands must seek their wives’ opinions. The couple should think through issues together, although the final word is his. Ideally, that final decision reflects a compromise.
JPA further clarified that a husband’s leadership should not be viewed as a form of dictatorship. My conversation with the thirty-nine-year-old entrepreneur and social security controller revealed a firm believer in traditional gender roles, which she views as integral to her culture: “ The man must take charge of the whole family. It is not like in Europe, or among Westerners, where…the man works, the woman works. It is 50- 50…in my household, it is my husband who carries the whole load. He takes on 90% of the family expenses. And he really is the one casting vision for the family”.
Beaming with pride, JPA told me that she works for her fulfilment and joy, not to help support her family.
Although her financial needs are taken care of, she highly values her career. When asked to give her opinion on a fictitious scenario where a man asks his wife, who is well-established in her career, to leave the country to help him seize a professional opportunity abroad, she emphatically told me that a woman should refuse to travel in such circumstances:
“I think people have to stop always making women pay. And it is always the woman who loses out, it is always the woman who sacrifices her part. I do not agree with that”. She shared that she once found herself in this situation and stayed behind with the children. The couple was in a long-distance relationship for some time.
I sought to understand how her husband’s visionary leadership applied in that situation. “Just because you are a leader does not mean you are going to make people live under a dictatorship.” she responded. “A good leader listens. A good leader is someone who really listens to others and can find solutions. It is not about forcing… (emphasis added)”
The potential of gender complementarity: expanding human rights frameworks for a pluralistic world
The testimonies suggest that gender complementarity does not inherently conflict with women’s empowerment. In fact, it seems capable of providing a safe and empowering framework through which they can navigate their cultural and spiritual identities while preserving their dignity and agency. Muslim feminist Wazir Jahan B. Karim challenges the idea that gender equality must be treated as a universal standard in modern society. She argues that a creative approach to gender complementarity has the capacity to significantly empower women.[3]
In that connection, there is a growing recognition and vigorous questioning of the domination of Eurocentric epistemologies and power structures in the human rights movement.[4] Emphasis has been placed on the connivance of Euro-modern legal instruments and knowledge in creating and reproducing a world unable to acknowledge lives lived beyond its own systems of understanding.[5]
The lack of attention paid to non-Western approaches to women’s empowerment that deviate from human rights standards constitutes both a testimonial and a hermeneutical injustice: not only does it point to a lack of value placed on such testimonies, but it also deprives these women of the hermeneutical tools needed to articulate their experiences intelligibly. Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to wrong a speaker “in his capacity as a giver of knowledge, as an informant.” Hermeneutical injustice happens when a lack of shared interpretive resources places someone at a disadvantage in understanding and/or explaining their social experiences.[6]
By stepping away from a strictly Western-centric interpretation of gender equality, we pave the way for a more inclusive and context-sensitive understanding of women’s human rights in a multicultural world.
[1] Koen De Feyter, ‘Localising Human Rights.’ in Wolfgang Benedek, Koen De Feyter and Fabrizio Marrella (eds), Economic Globalisation and Human Rights: EIUC Studies on Human Rights and Democratization. (Cambridge University Press 2007) 68.
[2] Mark Van Hoecke, ‘Family Law Transfers from Europe to Africa: Lessons for the Methodology of Comparative Legal Research.’ in John Gillepsie and Pip Nicholson (eds), Law and development and the global discourses of legal transfers. (Cambridge University Press 2012) 280.
[3] Wazir Jahan B. Karim, ‘In Body and Spirit: Redefining Gender Complementarity in Muslim Southeast Asia’ in Zawawi Ibrahim, Gareth Richards and Victor T King (eds), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia (Springer 2021) 105.
[4] Wouter Vandenhole, ‘Decolonising Children’s Rights: Of Vernacularisation and Interdisciplinarity.’ in Rebecca Budde and Urszula Markowska-Manista (eds), Childhood and Children’s Rights between Research and Activism (Springer VS 2020); Danielle Aldawood, ‘Decolonizing Approaches to Human Rights and Peace Education Higher Education Curriculum.’ (2020) 4 International Journal of Human Rights Education 1.
[5] Arturo Escobar, ‘Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise.’ in Walter D Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (eds), Globalization and the decolonial option (Routledge 2013) 50 quoted in Folúkẹ́ Adébísí, Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility (Bristol university press 2023) 27–28.
[6] Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford university press 2007) 2–7.
