GENDER, POWER AND THE SACRED: WOMEN’S NEGOTIATION OF RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY AND ROLES IN AFRICAN TRADITIONAL RELIGION

Abstract

This article examines how women in African Traditional Religion (ATR) negotiate religious authority, sacred roles, and spiritual power within patriarchal cosmological and social structures. It argues that women are neither passive subjectsofreligiousexclusion noruncritical beneficiaries of sacred inclusion; rather,theyoccupydynamic,contested, and at times transformative positions within ATR. The study is anchored on Oyeronke Oyewumi’s de-colonial feminist framework, which challenges the wholesale application of Western gender binaries to African religious experience. Drawing on qualitative documentary analysis and critical ethnographic engagement with existing scholarship from 2023 to 2026, the article explores how women mediate sacred space in roles such as divination, spirit mediumship, and priestly functions across Yoruba, Igbo, Akan, and Shona religious communities. Key findings reveal that women’s sacred authority in ATR is deeply situational, shaped by age, lineage, marital status, and the specific deity or spirit involved, rather than by gender alone. The study further finds that colonial disruption of ATR significantly altered indigenous gender arrangements, and that contemporary resurgence movements are partially restoring but also selectively reconstituting women’s roles in ways that reflect current political and cultural agendas. The article concludes that understanding women’s place in ATR requires moving beyond simple inclusion or exclusion narratives toward a framework that centres negotiation, fluidity, and cosmological complexity. It recommends interdisciplinary collaboration between religious studies scholars, gender theorists, and ATR communities to develop more contextually grounded frameworks for analysing sacred gender dynamics in Africa