The first time I came across feminism, it felt simple. I knew what it was naming. I also knew that the situation I was in as a woman in Nigeria demanded such an idea. But the more I tried to explain it to other people, or even back to myself sometimes, the more I found myself stumbling. The language already felt distorted. Feminism showed up as something translated and pre-explained. Feminists had to argue and negotiate the validity of our anger against racial pride.
I am tired of that negotiation.
The reason for this title is the conversations online where one woman brings up something seemingly ordinary, like who washes the plates, and another feminist responds that feminism is more than washing plates, that feminism is about the economic, political, and social equality of the sexes. And yes, of course it is. But does washing plates not enter into that? Does unpaid, repetitive, gendered labour somehow sit outside economics or social equality? I understand the instinct behind the correction. Feminism should sound serious. It should sound theoretically complete. But I also think that instinct reveals the very negotiation I am talking about. The moment the conversation touches tradition too directly, the moment it accuses ordinary domestic arrangements of being political, we begin to pull back. We say feminism is bigger than that which it is. I just do not agree that it should start somewhere else.
Because we must start there.
Lived Reality Before Theory
Buchi Emecheta, writer of Second-Class Citizen — one of the first feminist books I ever read — once said she had never called herself a feminist because she did not subscribe to the idea that all men were brutal and repressive and must be rejected. Some of those men, she said, were her brothers, fathers, and sons. That captures the exact problem many African women have had to deal with. Feminism is often presented in a way that seems to demand a break from community before it can even be spoken.
But the truth is, misogyny exists here.
African women did not need white people to tell us that unfairness was bad. I do not believe feminist consciousness arrived here as a foreign thought. I think it would always have appeared because the conditions that produce it have always existed. The language may change, but the consciousness itself — the refusal to accept women’s suffering as natural — is part of our history too. That is part of why the question “Is feminism African?” has always felt slightly dishonest. African Feminism has existed for a very long time in diverse forms, and even predates colonialism.
African feminism is not a copy of Western feminism, and it is not a refusal of all Western thought either. It is a way of understanding women’s lives from African realities first. Much of Western feminist history, especially the version most visible in mainstream discourse, involves women fighting for access to the workplace and the right to be seen as individuals outside the home.
Bell Hooks points out that one dominant strand of Western feminism emerged around the frustrations of middle- and upper-class white housewives who wanted “something more” than domestic life. African women, Nigerian women especially, have never been strangers to labour. We have always worked.
And this is why the domestic example matters. One size never fits all, and we need lived experience to show us where inequality is reproduced every day. Who cooks the food? Who serves the food? Who clears the table? Who washes up after everyone has eaten? Who is expected to move automatically while others remain seated?
What is African Feminism?
The debate on whether feminism is African often feels like a delay. These arguments often keep us locked in a distracting back-and-forth instead of letting us address the actual power relations in women’s lives.
At some point, we have to stop translating our need for dignity through cultural disclaimers in general, but mostly as women. Our feminist ideals must begin from our own conversations. But that also means being honest about the audience. Articles like this are written with a disagreeing reader in mind, but a better use of energy is being interested in women who already know, agree, and feel the gap between what they are expected to carry and what they receive in return.
Because the question has never been whether misogyny exists. It does. The question is what we do with that knowledge. That means changing reality where we can; splitting the labour and asking harder questions in our relationships, and our homes. Not because washing plates is the whole of feminism, but because it is one of the places where a whole social order shows its face. African Feminism lies in the ability of feminists to self-define but still hold on to core principles of equality and justice.
Community and Internalised Misogyny
Community is one of the most beautiful ideas in African life. It is also one of the ways misogyny survives.
One of the most useful things African feminist theory gives us is a way to read intimacy politically. Patriarchy survives not only through law, but through habit and what gets defended as “good upbringing.” It hides inside affection and presents itself as love or benevolence, but sometimes it is as simple as expectation, as being called “our wife” while quietly being initiated into service.
It is in the community that women end up policing one another, not because women are the cause of patriarchy, but because they have been taught to preserve it. Many women defend the very traditions that harm them. They romanticise suffering, double it and pass it to the next person. Feminism is largely seen as selfish because the rules of the community are expected to override the individual, no matter how unfair they are.
And that is how a system keeps running even though it only serves a specific order: a specific kind of man and a specific idea of family that most people in Nigeria do not even fully meet.
This is why our lived experience matters. Our private practices at home become the systems we live under in public. If boys are not taught to notice labour and girls are taught to perform it without thinking, then inequality is already being reproduced long before anybody speaks about rights in public. You cannot challenge patriarchy meaningfully outside the home while rehearsing it perfectly within it.
So what’s the point?
Who will wash the plates is not a trivial question. It is not beneath politics; it is one of the many places where misogyny becomes ordinary enough to hide in plain sight.
That is why African feminism matters. Specifically because it does not give us a borrowed identity, but a language to describe what has always been there. And the right to say that feminism is part of our history, our present, and our political imagination without first apologising for seeing misogyny clearly. African feminism is not made legitimate by sounding less foreign; it is made necessary by the realities African women already live.
So yes, have that conversation with your husband, your boyfriend, your brothers, your sons. After we finish eating the food I made, who will wash the plates?
