Nongayindoda: moving beyond gender in a South African context

Ifi Amadiume's seminal work, Male Daughters, Female Husbands developed significant insights into the relationship between gender, wealth and power, and anticipated the centrality of gendered labour processes in the survival of the family/household by highlighting the articulation between reproductive labour and the productive economy. In this epoch when various postcolonial states are grappling anew with land and agrarian questions, Amadiume's detailed study of the decommodification of land is especially salient for feminist inquiry as she has already drawn attention to the ways in which land functions generationally in the reproduction of authority, ritual, governance, kinship and power. This paper proposes a similar move beyond the present discourses which emphasise women's roles in the social reproduction of labour power, asking how a critical reading of Amadiume might help us understand the significance of social reproduction in relation to land as a contemporary realm of feminist power and struggles.