Africana Studies and Gender Relations in the Twenty First Century‪.‬

Introduction African people are the genesis of human kind and over the ages men and women have complemented each other in work, family life and goals. This complementarity in gender relations must be kept for a healthy continued development in a discipline that maintains a dual mission of academic excellence and social responsibility. Focusing on its intellectual discourse, the question needs to be asked insistently and consistently: What would promote strong and positive gender relations in demonstrated intellectually sound scholarship? And, how does the discipline nurture this kind of development? Much of the African world might agree on an approach to the discipline that promotes and enhances equity, is balanced with and by work of both genders, offers rewards to both, and functions in a sustainable relation to the academy's other entities or disciplines. Determining whether this is the case and how such an equitable discipline might be developed are enormous questions Africana scholars should be tackling. Indeed, Africana scholars have the ability to create a much better discipline than we have yet succeeded in creating.