Lynne Washington has been studying leadership and authority among Black women within the Yoruba tradition for many years. This comes partly out of her experiences as a lay minister in both the Christian tradition and the Ifa/Yoruba tradition in her home city of Atlanta, Georgia. Recently, she has been studying these questions through writing her research-based dissertation for Antioch University’s PhD in Leadership and Change. The final dissertation, which she completed in 2024, is titled “Chieftaincy in a Lappa: Portraiture Leadership of Black Women.” The work is deeply rooted in the intersections of personal experience, ancestral heritage, and academic inquiry, offering a nuanced perspective on how Black women navigate leadership roles in both indigenous and diasporic contexts.
In a recent Zoom interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, I was able to ask her about the challenges of cross-cultural research and the importance of empathy in understanding diverse perspectives. She shared about the disconnections caused by colonialism and slavery, as well as the subsequent and ongoing efforts to rebuild communal ties.
In your dissertation, you’re exploring the leadership and authority of Black women in Yoruba culture, and I’m wondering what ultimately inspired you to pick this topic?
In the diaspora, this particular tradition is growing. But the experiences of Black women and women of color are much different from the experiences of women in West Africa. That was the basic thinking around the research and the doctoral work.
The next piece was the work of a woman by the name of Dr. Greer Stanford Randall. She has since transitioned, meaning she’s passed on. She was an African American female, but she was a chief in the Yoruba tradition, and her chieftaincy stemmed from the African tradition. Her leadership role was challenged. In the society that she was a part of, which dealt with ancestral work, women weren’t necessarily leaders. But here in America that was not an issue. And she was a womanist as well. She was very clear that some of the traditional spiritual understandings had validity, but they were not necessarily binding. Especially in the context of African Americans, many of their ancestors died on this soil, between coming from Africa and arriving in the Americas. So, there were some different dynamics. So those were the two primary reasons.
Then there’s a third. The other piece was going to Nigeria and seeing how women lead, and what they call ‘snail leadership.’ They come out of the shell, they do what they have to do, and when they feel a sense of some tension, they go back into the shell till it cools off and then go back in to do what they do. The roles were very different in terms of identity.
Those were some of the factors that encouraged me. I was also trying to figure it out, because Atlanta is a growing city, but a lot of the learning comes from Africa, which is not necessarily the same cultural context. In some ways, it can be beneficial and problematic as well. Well, I should say challenging and inconvenient.
How has your own role in spiritual leadership shaped your research?
I’ve been pastoring in a church for quite some time. I’ve been ordained in the Christian tradition for quite some time. My father and my stepmother were traditionalists in many ways, adhering to Ifa practices. So I’ve had the blessing of being in both spaces. I do not believe that when we go into religious traditions, we go in with only one way to do it. African Americans especially come in with their ancestral heritage. They come in with levels of Native American spirituality that have come into their traditions through slavery. They come in with colonialization and colonial understandings of religious and spiritual spaces. When we try to identify with this as the only way—or consider this way correct or better than another—I think it takes away from the notion that there is one waGod. I am of the teaching that God speaks in many languages. Why is that important? Because the whole purpose is to understand it’s bigger than anything here, and that God is bigger than anyone’s understanding. When we become so siloed or so absolute, that’s a problem.
We are in a very diversified world, and the biggest challenge is that we’re unable to support, respect, and listen to diverse points of view, because we know everything. We have all the answers. That’s just not true. God is bigger than that. The goal is to understand God and understand that there are other dimensions—higher, bigger, and greater than what we can see.
Spirituality is such a big part of many people that if you can’t talk to somebody about that dimension of their personhood I don’t think you can fully know them. I’m curious if you have any advice for people in these conversations when they are coming to the table with different understandings of God, religion, or spirituality?
For my dissertation I had three groups of women. One group was Indigenous women who held leadership roles in West African society in a traditional context. Next was a Christian woman who was married to a Yoruba man, who had taken on the culture but not the spirituality as an Ifa practitioner. And then the third group was women who had been Christian and had taken on Ifa spirituality and traditions in America. So they were coming from basically three different positions or three different kinds of intersections.
In the interviews and the listening process, what I listened for was leadership: what gives you the authority to do what you do? That was the basis of the interviews. What gives you the authority to do what you do? What it came back to, which was a huge piece for all three, was either their parental leadership role models or their ancestral lineage of spirit-filled feeling like their ancestors, their grandmothers. A lot of grandmother talk: their grandmothers had empowered them to speak, or their mothers had empowered them to speak. That was a huge piece. It was a leveler.
It all centered around wanting to know even more. Instead of shutting off conversation, there was an openness, a longing. Now, from the African American women who were in the Ifa tradition, there was a slight reticence about doing the wrong thing because it’s very ritualized. There was always a fear of doing the wrong thing, offending elders, and similar concerns. Elder men or women on the other side of the ocean, that was a part of the conversation. The African women who were in leadership were more respectful in their language and their understanding of the role that men play in the tradition, but nevertheless they were going to do what they were going to do, in the way in which they were going to do it. So all of the women across the board felt empowered. How they lived it out was a little bit different.
You describe the lens of Motherism as essential to your research. How do you see the role of Motherism in leadership?
Motherism is really about an alternative perspective to Black liberation. Motherism comes out of a very Afrocentric model, which basically says that you can’t be a free female unless he’s free. You both have to be free together. It is more of a collective vision versus an individual vision. Motherism is about one’s common humanity. For liberation, Black men have to be a part of it. The whole purpose is the health and wellness of the family.
The leadership context comes into play with the ability to pick up on something being wrong in the village, community, or whatever the setting, and seeing that something needs to be corrected to support it. For example, children are begging for food, or they’re consistently not being cared for. We need to be able to look at that and know that the order is off—and then come back with a reordering. And that reordering comes out of a sense of character, because in Afrocentric systems, in womanist systems, you are your own character. This moves the woman into a transformational leadership role. How can I transform this situation? Not that I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Oh, I want to be a transformational leader.’ No, this is something that has to happen to better a particular situation.
Then there’s creating the structure. If these three kids are constantly wandering the street, and let’s just assume that the mother is living, then something else is happening. This is very much a part of what has happened in Black families through slavery. The mother is sold off, and the father is sold off. How do we connect with this child? Or individuals who have been bifurcated through a system that’s not of their doing? This happened through reconstruction and the Great Migration. There’s this notion of creating structures that support. Some of the structures that have supported them have historically been religious institutions, such as the church. Sometimes support systems didn’t help Black women and didn’t support family structures as well.
Then the last part of Motherism is building and rebuilding. Maybe what we created is not quite right, so how do we come in and redefine it? I think we saw a lot of that in the recent presidential campaign, particularly at the highest level, where Black women, although not universally, were represented. Most Black women are members of some form of club or organization that tends to focus on forming friendships, establishing societies, and promoting education. Right? However, we saw these organizations that may have operated— on a scale of 1 to 10, they were at level 8. So perhaps we can raise it to 10. We saw the highest level of African American women, both financially and thought-wise, coming together to support and create new ways of being political, new ways of being supportive of each other, and new ways of philanthropy to help other Black women in their political and societal efforts for the betterment of society.
Were there any ‘Aha!’ moments or insights that particularly resonated with you during your research?
Well, from my research, I know that Black women are really confident, and we don’t need permission. That for me is probably the most ‘Aha!’ moment. We’re not waiting for permission now. We’re from a mother’s position. We’re going to do our best to bring you with us: Black men, Black family. But at the end of the day, we don’t need permission from a womanist, Black feminist, Africana feminist, or Africana womanist position. We don’t need permission because we know what we need to do internally. Just allow us the space to do what we need to do. If you don’t let us have the space, we’re going to take the space differently.
That’s what you see from African women. They’re going to take the space, but you don’t even know the space has been taken. Whereas I think African American women are going to be more vocal about it and have this whole issue around gender and Black male masculinity. So, that’s a point of probably more research. And actually it’s a point that did come out in the dissertation: how do we have those dialogues. How do we get two groups, two gendered groups, ethnic groups who’ve been heavily colonialized, and those who have been so misogynistic, who don’t know how to have that conversation in a healthy way, to listen to each other? As things are going, I can see the genderization from a surface perspective in African societies. Now, there are always exceptions. Nigerian culture is very paternalistic, whereas the Ghanaian culture is very maternalistic. Ethiopian culture is very maternalistic. So there are different nuances in the sub-context, but they’re all workable.
Your dissertation is such a culturally rich and complex study. I’m curious if you have any advice or insights for anyone conducting research that’s cross-continental and cross-cultural?
Be very clear about who your population is and what you’re trying to get out of it. It’s also beneficial to spend some significant time there. For me, my husband is Yoruba, so I was always there to spend time, to observe. The other piece, which was very helpful to me, was to read works done by African women. That gave a very different context. A lot of times, if you were to ask people, ‘Are you reading stuff from Nigerian women that they’re writing?’ they haven’t got a clue. So that has been very important to be able to read it and to really kind of take off your Western lens of judgment.
I love that. Thank you.
