African Feminism and Womanism

The term "womanist" was coined by the African American writer Alice Walker in her essay collection In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), where she famously defined the relationship between the terms with the phrase "womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender," signaling a Black women's standpoint distinct from, though related to, mainstream feminism. The Nigerian literary scholar Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi adapted and extended the concept specifically to the African context in her essay "Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English," published in the journal Signs in 1985, where she argued that African womanism centers the family and the wider community, and characteristically seeks the cooperative transformation, rather than the wholesale rejection, of relationships with men — a stance Ogunyemi presented as more attuned to African social realities than what she characterized as an individualist, sometimes separatist, current within Western liberal and radical feminism.