Women, Literature and Development in Africa

Anthonia C. Kalu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429648274
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire africaine

This book is a powerful exploration of the role of women in the evolution of African thinking and narratives on development, from the precolonial period right through to the modern day. Whilst the book identifies women's oppression and marginalization as significant challenges to contemporary Africa's advancement, it also explores how new written narratives draw on traditional African knowledge systems to bring deep-rooted and sometimes radical approaches to progress.

The book asserts that Africans must tell their own stories, expressed through the complex meanings and nuances of African languages and often conveyed through oral traditions and storytelling, in which women play an important role. The book's close examination of language and meaning in the African narrative tradition advances the illumination and elevation of African storytelling as part of a viable and valid knowledge base in its own right, rather than as an extension of European paradigms and methods.

Anthonia C. Kalu's new edition of this important book, fully revised throughout, will also include fresh analysis of the role of digital media, education, and religion in African narratives. At a time when the prominence and participation of African women in development and sociopolitical debates is growing, this book's exploration of their lived experiences and narrative contribution will be of interest to students of African literature, gender studies, development, history, and sociology.

1
THE AFRICAN WOMAN AND AFRICAN LITERARY CRITICISM

Although contemporary African literary criticism is a product of Africa’s contact with the West, evaluation and analyses relevant to the African experience must be derived from methods intrinsic to African art traditions. The dynamism evident in African life today emanates from traditional consciousness, which embeds the arts in all aspects of life. In precolonial Africa, this complex relationship mandated an incessant search for ways to improve current situations, i.e., development.

Colonial interference encouraged separation from African traditional reality and existence and resulted in cultural, social, political and other forms of disarticulation. According to Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1972), the forced disengagement from familiar ways of knowing was recorded in narrative form:

You know the popular story among our people: that the Mubia told the people to shut their eyes in prayer, and when later they opened their eyes, the land was taken. And then, so the story goes, the Mubia told them not to worry about those worldly things which could be eaten by moth; and they sang: Thi ino ti yakwa ndi nwihitukiri (“this world is not my home, I am only a pilgrim”).

(33) (emphasis added)

Significantly, parts of the new narratives authorized African people’s disengagement from traditional land and arts. Consequently, African literature began early to explore the dynamics of contemporary African existence, and literary criticism became grounded in the exploration of the overt expressions of the new, scriptocentric legacy.

Further, the colonial educational system excluded the woman, causing her social, cultural and political dislocation in the new dispensation. Her subsequent silence has yet to be addressed in contemporary African experience. The dearth of African literary genres that support the African woman’s participation in the (re)creation and maintenance of societal vision evidences her silencing and apparent invisibility in Africa’s encounter with the West. Her participation is more overt in the postcolonial arena. Although African writers did not exclude her from the emerging culture that impressed African experience for a largely external readership, her portrayal became problematic in the contemporary setting, which devised rules for her participation in the new dispensation. This seems a minor problem except that the task of reasserting the African woman’s presence was left to Western-educated African men who, themselves, were inadequately inscribed in the new dispensation. Burdened with the responsibility for self-reclamation and the risk of a lost homeland, a significant number of early writers overtly articulated the African male. For a long time, portrayals of the African female resonated with the concept of community and/or the female principle. Achebe’s description of his own moment of self-recognition in the Africa/West discourse is instructive:

I went to the first university that was built in Nigeria, and I took a course in English. We were taught the same kind of literature that British people were taught in their own university. But then I began to look at these books in a different light. When I had been younger, I had read these adventure books about the good white man, you know, wandering into the jungle or into danger, and the savages were after him. And I would instinctively be on the side of the white man. You see what fiction can do, it can put you on the wrong side if you are not developed enough. In the university, I suddenly saw that these books had to be read in a different light. Reading Heart of Darkness, for instance, which was a very, very highly praised book and which is still very highly praised, I realized that I was one of those savages jumping up and down the beach. Once that kind of enlightenment comes to you, you realize that someone has to write a different story.

(Bill Moyers 1989: 343)

Although most postcolonials are aware of the dynamism of art in African society, that knowledge is rarely used to foster the new African development agenda in accordance with traditional norms. Acceptance of the colonial experience required that most elements within ancestral heritage be reconceptualized as obstacles to advancement. Consequently, most contemporary narratives reexamine the known African world or explore the reinvented terrain circumscribed by the colonial encounter.

For those born after Independence, the problem manifests as incoherence between history, political culture and the arts. Beneficiaries of conditions of underdevelopment already in progress, they accept the violence of the modern African city with its bright lights that mask corruption and filth. And such acceptance presumes congruity of a modern African state. Given this situation, contemporary African literary criticism, which deploys Western analytical norms, implicitly demands continuation of violence and filth in the postcolonial state. I am not implying here that a discussion of the negative aspects of existence and experience are not valid or acceptable. Critical appraisal is necessary and pertinent. Problems arise when these become the major foci of exploration. And postcolonial African reality consists of African and Western colonial experiences. Immersed in the norms of two enduring cultures, the postcolonial must not continue to ignore African ways of ordering experience while upholding disabling Western and colonial imperatives. Without the development of stronger, viable insights into African thought, African participation in the international arena will remain normative.

African thought remains significant to postcolonial existence. Also, contemporary African literature must continue to engage viable African development through continuous examination and portrayal of the realities of the new dispensation. African core statements are significant to African literature because, more than the writers’ ability for normal literary practice, they show the capacity for change encoded in African ways of knowing. The statements explored here are society relevant and communally derived. Most are about women; some are not. A major concern is the re-entrenchment of women- and/or female-related aspects of selected statements into contemporary discourse. The focus is to examine the society’s capacity to maintain harmony and equilibrium using some recognizable predictions embedded in the selected statements.

In Flora Nwapa’s Efuru (1966), the eponymous character, Efuru (the lost) is also named Nwaononaku (the child/one who dwells in wealth). Her two names delineate the spaces that have developed in prevailing analyses of the African woman. However, most examinations of Efuru’s childlessness and her failed marriages mandate a literary criticism that mirrors Africa’s economic dependence on the West. Analytically, this focus continues the disabling postures that sustained the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonization. This viewpoint also presumes that Efuru and her experiences are individual and personal losses in an Oguta that is focused on community harmony and growth. Such conclusions are at odds with the widespread assumption that African ways of knowing assert the supremacy of community and a narrative vision that portrays characters whose experiences are nonessential to societal objectives and goals. The study of the African woman must transcend current pressures to normalize the adversity and disunity in her experience. Rather than facilitating her full domestic and international participation, such pressures hinder her and stall African advancement. A brief survey of some prevailing viewpoints in contemporary African literature will illustrate what I mean here.

Activist feminism

A prevailing view in African literary criticism is rooted in the need to create a niche for the female African writer and critic within the contemporary literary tradition. This approach develops out of the years of silence and struggle that many African women scholars experienced in the academic arena. Many African women scholars opposed the silencing, which seemed supported by a male-dominated African literary criticism. Thus Theoretical African Feminism maintains that only the African woman can convincingly explore her experience. Insisting that “a different set of criteria … [not] be applied to women’s writing” ( Jones, et al. 1987: 3), this school seeks validation of the African woman through in-depth exploration of other exclusionary traditions. Subscribers to this school also agree that:

African feminist criticism is definitely engaged criticism in much the same way as progressive African literary criticism grapples with decolonization and feminist criticism with the politics of male literary dominance.

(Davies, 12)

Though most adherents agree that “for African feminists, the double allegiance to woman’s emancipation and African liberation becomes one” (Davies, 12), they find that Negritude was wrong-headed in creating romantic and mythic images of the African woman. Also, the African male writer’s and/or critic’s glorification of African motherhood is seen as oppressive and offensive because their expressed views conform to “other prescribed female roles which is at the core of most African poetry” (6). And

although the concept [Feminism] may not enter the daily existence of the average [African] woman, and although much of what she understands as feminism is filtered through a media that is male-dominated and male-oriented, African women recognize the inequities and, especially within the context of struggles for national liberation, are challenging entrenched male-dominance. Theoretical African Feminism understands the interconnectedness of race, class and sex oppression.

(Davies, 10–11)

This school’s argument ignores the fact that the creation of mythic African womanhood is coextensive with the proposal that the African woman’s world be seen through her own eyes. Clearly, Negritude’s idealized African woman and images of other nationalist movements coincide with those of Theoretical African Feminism writ large. This approach also assumes a universalistic approach to liberation, women’s emancipation, African liberation and African women’s emancipation, which evoke the veneration of the African woman with “mountains on her back.” Using a postcolonialist feminist ideology that prompts a metaphysical filter of inclusion by exclusion, this approach sets up barriers similar to those whose elimination remains part of its agenda. But stated commitment to the cause of the African woman’s liberation is present as a major concern. Significant analyses advocate a confrontational research program that perceives the African woman’s liberation as a struggle against non-feminists, perceived traditionalists and men.

Borrowing from activist-oriented ideologies, this research program (re)defines the African woman’s world for her, setting parameters that are based on what she ought to see rather than on her reality. However, this school admits the existence of pockets of power “allowed” women by recognizing aspects of women’s participation in decision-making institutions within traditional African communities. Generally, it faults all men for keeping power to themselves and, in particular, African men for not decrying debilitating African traditions that seek the perpetuation of oppressive roles for the African woman.

Missionary feminism

This school of thought employs a predominantly moral approach. Some aspect of feminist consciousness grounds the thinking of most adherents. One of its earliest practitioners is Amanda Berry Smith, a 19th century African American missionary to Africa. Part of her report on African women presents most of the issues that current missionary feminists deal with and deserves quoting in detail:

The poor women of Africa, like those of India, have a hard time. As a rule, they have all the hard work to do. They have to cut and carry all the wood, carry all the water on their heads, plant all the rice. The men and boys cut and burn the bush, with the help of the women; but sowing the rice, and planting the cassava, the women have to do.

You will often see a great, big man walking ahead, with nothing in his hand but a cutlass (as they always carry that or a spear), and a woman, his wife, coming on behind, with a great big child on her back, and a load on her head.

No matter how tired she is, her lord would not think of bringing her a jar of water, to cook his supper with, or of beating the rice; no, she must do that. A great big boy would not bring water for his mother; he would say:

“Boy no tote water; that be woman’s work.”

If they live with missionaries, or Liberians, or anyone outside of their own native people, then they will do such things; but not for one another.

(Amanda Berry Smith, 17)

Smith’s account is filled with the usual stories of heathenism, witchcraft and the darkness predicted for non-Christians. Within her narrative, her own ministering to the Bishop is not considered oppressive because the Bishop needed her services and the “backward natives” were too ignorant to eat by the clock.

We used to get up in the morning early; I would boil some water and make the Bishop a cup of cocoa or coffee, and so give him an early breakfast. The natives were always kind and hospitable; they would have their meal about nine or ten o’clock; but we would be very faint by that time, not being used to it; and, as the Bishop was a very early riser, I knew it was best for him to have something to eat before that time. And then I always took a cup of tea, or something it was late in the day.

(17)

Nowhere in Smith’s account does she stop to ask why the Bishop did not boil water for his own tea. The prevailing viewpoint is that of a missionary trained to detect and correct the wrong practices of the native; the missionary’s major focus is the native’s conversion. Smith’s vocation enables her to see her chores for the Bishop as her duty and to defend the missionary ethic as objective truth. This leads the reader to believe that Smith’s Africans sleep through the better part of the morning (they do not eat breakfast until nine or ten o’clock), and their laziness requires missionary intervention as part of their redemption.

Unable to perceive herself as a returning native, Smith fails to see that the cutlass-carrying African male “walking ahead” and his burdened wife are victims of slave raids that required able-bodied African men to protect women and children from raiders of African bodies for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Continued myopic reading of this African family caravan is based on the premise that mails-of-armor-wearing and magnificent-white-horse-riding men are chivalrous, non-African inventions while cutlass- or spear-carrying African men are primitive and oppressive. In other words, cutlass- or spear-carrying men do not (cannot?) protect or rescue women or children in distress.

Undoubtedly, Smith recounts events that took place in the 19th century. But this way of looking at Africa is current. For example, in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) Netie is both missionary and social critic in fictional Olinka and reflects current US views of Africa and African women. Also, Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) extends this burden of social criticism “on behalf of” oppressed African womanhood into the area of activism in creative writing. According to the narrative objectives of Smith’s and Walker’s works, African women are either inherently incapable of seeing the extent of their own oppression, or they lack necessary objectivity in their writings (thoughts?) about it. Among the works of African-born women writers, Buchi Emecheta’s works best exemplify this school of thought.

In African literary studies, this need to detect and correct the African woman’s vision takes a number of forms. It assumes that: (a) African male-female relationships need correction, (b) African women must take control of their lives and bodies at all costs, and (c) the contemporary African male is to blame for the oppressive conditions of the African woman’s roles in the family and society. This approach seeks to redirect the African woman toward a better way of life. It explores issues like the brutality of polygamy; the unreasonable expectations of mothers who cannot bear to see their daughters choose differen...