Abstract
Mkpilikpi Okwu
The thesis of Oyeronke Oyewumi that women were invented by Western gender discourse as subordinate beings under the domination of racist imperialist patriarchy is a convincing thesis to make from the perspective of Africa-centered discourse. No African language has a word that translates into gender, even though Africans have the roles and identities called men and women, male and female, boys and girls, mothers and fathers, grandfathers and grandmothers, etc. The relationships between them are not polarized as binaries and hierarchized in Africa the way the European principle of primogeniture dictates. In the European worldview, patriarchy assumes that all males are dominant over all females, irrespective of age, wisdom, experience, and wealth. This papyrus supports Oyewumi's claim that in Africa, generation is often more important than gender or wealth, and that African names signify this.