by Sharon Adetutu Omotoso
Introduction
Feminist studies have allowed for a suffixing of ethics with various terms with reference to lived experiences across spaces. Most popular among such is the feminist ethics of care drawn largely from global north experiences and often uncritically applied across cultures due to little or no attention paid to deeper contextual theorising on, from and for Africa. Why is African feminist ethics important? How should we think about feminist ethics in an African sense? What should constitute African feminist ethical theories? This piece seeks to establish the importance of internal thinking and the imperative of naming whatever has been described within African feminist ethics research. African ethics in academia has recently emerged to “define moral concepts derived and derivable from African people” (Wareham 2017, 858). Metz (2017, 340) describes African ethics as “normative theory of right action that has an African pedigree [with] the requirement to produce harmony and to reduce discord, where harmony is a matter of identity and solidarity”. African ethics has focused on “deciding general principles on which terms like ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘duty’, and so on are to be applied to anything and with deciding precisely what these terms mean in the African context, and then in comparison with other cultural frameworks” (Omotoso 2017, 55). This is an important turn towards decolonising morality rather than a process of Africanising morality, which has a sinister undertone of writing Africa into morality, when indeed African philosophy embodies ethics. African ethics has been ventured largely from selected cultural-religious accounts of ethical norms (Mbiti 1969; Kinoti 2010) and individuals’ scholarly reflections (Chimakonam and CordeiroRodrigues 2023) on familial and ancestral basis and the concept of personhood (Molefe 2016).
Read the full article below or download here
06_FA2025_Vol6.3_Standpoint_Omotoso