Saidi to Present Fall 2025 Chambliss Faculty Lecture

From Kutztown University

Kutztown University is proud to host an engaging and interactive lecture by Dr. Christine Saidi, professor of African and World History, for Kutztown University’s Fall 2025 Chambliss Faculty Lecture at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 4, at 183 McFarland Student Union. In addition to the in-person event, this year’s Chambliss lecture will be available as a webinar on Zoom and will be uploaded to YouTube following the event.

Saidi’s lecture is titled “No Woman, No Man: The Non-Binary Gendered World of Bantu-Speaking peoples.” This talk proposes that gender, though sometimes acknowledged, was not a major factor in determining authority or responsibility and was rarely conceptualized in binary terms by Bantu-speaking peoples over the last 5,000 years prior to colonialism. The lack of historical binary gender concepts within the BMZ is supported by ethnographic studies and oral traditions that represent social activity between 3000 BCE and the present, as well as linguistic data, which can date Bantu epistemologies and social history to earlier periods.

In her upcoming lecture, Saidi will discuss how gender in Bantu-speaking peoples isn’t fixed in the same way it is in the West. In social, religious, and political contexts, individuals who were anatomically one identity could, through social actions or spiritual transitions, embody various roles, intersecting from one world, one life stage, or one social title to the next. This kind of gender flexibility is counter to binary gender concepts, which classify gender into two separate, opposite, and rigid forms of masculine and feminine. Bantu-speaking peoples are 75% of the population south of the Sahara Desert, which means they represent a significant portion of Africa.

In the recent Constitutional Court ruling in South Africa, affirming that men can take their wife’s surname in marriage, Saidi’s work was cited in the judgment (“Women in Precolonial Africa,” (Digital) Oxford Research Encyclopedia African History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Saidi has published two books, “Women’s Authority and Society in Early East-Central Africa” (2010) and “Bantu Africa” (2017). She has two more books nearing completion, entitled “Beyond Gender in Early African History” and “Gendered Implications of Matriliny in Africa, Past and Present.”

She has also published three articles in leading peer-reviewed journals since 2021, with another one before this. In 2021, she published “Leza, Sungu, and Samba: Digital Humanities and Early Bantu History” in History in Africa. Her “The Father is also the Sister: A Non-Binary Gendered History of Matrilineal Bantu Communities” appeared the following year in a special matriliny issue of the Nordic Journal of African Studies. Saidi’s “My Husband is Also My Daughter: The Social History of Bantu Matrilineal Zones: 1450-1800” was published in 2023 by Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She has also published six chapters in books.

Saidi also produced four digital publications including “East, Central, and South Africa from 300 CE to 1000 CE” in ABC-CLIO Encyclopedia of World History (2010); “Kingdom of the Kongo” in Encyclopedia of Empire (2013); “Women in Precolonial Africa” in Oxford University Research Encyclopedia African History (2020); and “Early Modern Women of Africa” in Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing. She has also contributed no less than six chapters to four different African history books.

The post Saidi to Present Fall 2025 Chambliss Faculty Lecture appeared first on BCTV.

Source: bctv