Some of the early studies of gender draw on cultural nationalist discourse to focus on celebrating the power they ascribe to women in indigenous African cultures, attributing the oppression of women to colonialism and rejecting feminism, defined as Western, and thus irrelevant to African societies. Boyce Davies describes this approach as 'culturalist feminism' pointing out the limited evidence for the claim that pre-colonial Africa was less oppressive to women. Drawing on the work of Diop and a number of colonial anthropological studies, the culturalist approach repeats the methodological errors of the cultural nationalist historiography noted in the introduction above. Like first generation cultural nationalism, culturalist feminism takes imperialism as its main protagonist. In order to dismiss 'feminism' it is therefore defined as an aspect of imperialism. ${ }^{5}$ While anti-imperialism has wide currency, subsuming 'feminism' under this rubric has a collateral cost, namely the dismissal of the many decades of continental feminism that have followed and moved beyond the cultural nationalism that characterized the mid-twentieth-century movements.