African Conceptualisations of Masculinities and Femininities: Insights from Vhavenda Indigenous Knowledge Systems

This article examines how masculinity and femininity are understood within Vhavenda Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKSs) in Limpopo Province, South Africa. Using a structured qualitative desktop review and thematic analysis of the scholarly literature, it asks how Vhavenda ideas of manhood and womanhood are woven into kinship systems, initiation schools, spirituality, social responsibility, and communal ethics. Vhavenda-specific scholarship, both historical and recent, forms the evidence base. Wider African and decolonial gender scholarship serves as an interpretive and comparative resource, not as proof of Vhavenda practice. On the evidence reviewed, the article argues that gender identities among the Vhavenda are relational rather than individualistic and are shaped by cultural expectations regarding social accountability, caregiving, leadership, respect, and the safeguarding of community values. It also considers how colonialism, Christianity, urbanisation, formal education and globalisation have reshaped, though not erased, indigenous gender constructions, and it points out where recent evidence on present-day practice is still thin. The paper contributes to African gender scholarship by showing that Vhavenda understandings of masculinity and femininity cannot be adequately captured by universalist Western categories and must be situated within indigenous epistemologies and lived realities. It closes by calling for decolonial approaches that place Indigenous Knowledge Systems at the centre of gender research in Africa, and by sketching an agenda for empirical work that brings oral histories and cultural custodians into direct dialogue with the theoretical literature.