Beyond the Binary Code: African Ritual Epistemologies and the Design of Artificial Intelligence That Serves Women and Girls

Artificial intelligence is being adopted across African public administration; health; education and finance; and the systems concerned act on a recorded or inferred gender value before they deliver anything at all. The problem this article addresses is that the categories operating in digital identity registers; automated facial analysis; biometric enrolment for social grants and language technologies are binary; anatomically grounded and administratively fixed; and that this specification reached the continent as a colonial import rather than as a description of how gendered standing is actually held. The article traces the descent of that binary; recovers from one southern African site a documented account of how gendered personhood is conferred and revised; and converts that account into design requirements. The design is conceptual and genealogical, reading three corpora against one another: the ethnographic record of the Balobedu of Bolobedu in Limpopo, South Africa; principally the Krige corpus and later commentary upon it; the technical and audit literature on gender classification; and South African identification law. Yoruba and Igbo scholarship is retained for comparison. Standing at the site is shown to be conferred through office; seniority; cattle and marriage rather than read from the body; so that a woman may hold the position of husband and a queenship may pass through a line of women. Systems in current use represent none of the properties by which such standing is held; and the article specifies thirteen changes to datasets; taxonomies; interfaces and procurement through which they could do so.