Gender and Ritual Power in Africa: A Genealogy Beyond the “Women’s Issue”

The claim that gender diversity is a leadership issue rather than a women’s issue circulates widely in transformation policy and university planning, yet it is rarely given historical or epistemic grounding, and almost never an African one. This article asks how ceremonial and ritual authority was gendered in selected African cultural institutions, through what mechanisms colonial rule reconfigured that gendering, and what follows for contemporary leadership theory and for African higher education and public governance. The study is conceptual and qualitative. It applies genealogical documentary analysis to a purposively assembled corpus of forty scholarly and policy texts published between 1976 and 2026, analysed in three phases of descent, emergence and residue. The framework combines the coloniality of gender, Foucauldian genealogy, Weberian authority and relational leadership read alongside Ubuntu, and it operationalises two constructs defined at the outset: authority as an installed position and authority as a relational function. Six findings are reported. Authority was installed rather than possessed, distributed across complementary gendered offices, and carried by statuses detachable from anatomy; ritual office formed a distinct register; colonial indirect rule masculinised public office and bureaucratised what had been relational; and the women’s-issue framing is the residue of that sequence. Seven recommendations follow, centred on measuring the distribution of authority rather than headcounts alone.