Who cares for the widow?: African Epistemology of Care and Yoruba Widowhood Practices

Yoruba widowhood practices are often justified as communal mechanisms of support, protection, and care for widows following the death of a spouse. These practices, rooted in African relational worldviews, are promoted as ways to maintain societal harmony and to guarantee the widow's reintegration into the community. Existing scholarship has largely examined these practices through the lenses of patriarchy, human rights, gender oppression, and cultural reform, with insufficient attention to the epistemic dimensions of care and the status of widows as knowers within widowhood practices. In this article, I employ Elvis Imafidon’s African Epistemology of Care and a feminist philosophical framework to examine the conflict between the communal care used to justify Yoruba widowhood practices and the neglect of widows' own care needs, agency, and epistemic voice. The article contends that the neglect of widows encompasses not only material and emotional aspects but also epistemic ones, as communal expectations and cultural narratives often shape their voices and experiences. As a result, their status as epistemic actors is diminished, and the relational goals of human flourishing, responsiveness, and attention that are fundamental to African notions of care are compromised. The study contributes to African feminist philosophy by highlighting how epistemic injustice can illuminate the failures of care embedded within culturally sanctioned widowhood practices.