Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender

Florence Stratton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000158779
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The influence of colonialism and race on the development of African literature has been the subject of a number of studies. The effect of patriarchy and gender, however, and indeed the contributions of African women, have up until now been largely ignored by the critics. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender is the first extensive account of African literature from a feminist perspective.
In this first radical and exciting work Florence Stratton outlines the features of an emerging female tradition in African fiction. A chapter is dedicated to each to the works of four women writers: Grace Ogot, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta and Mariama Ba. In addition she provides challenging new readings of canonical male authors such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo'o and Wole Soyinka. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender thus provides the first truly comprehensive definition of the current literary tradition in Africa.

Part II

ROOM FOR WOMEN

3

MEN FALL APART

Grace Ogot’s novels and short stories

Like 1945 and 1958, 1966 is a significant date in African literary history. For in that year Grace Ogot’s The Promised Land, the first novel by a woman to be published by the East African Publishing House, and Flora Nwapa’s Efuru, the first work by a woman in the Heinemann African Writers Series, both appeared. The year 1966 can thus be said to mark the advent of a contemporary female tradition in fiction. This event has not been written into the literary records, as critics have tended to treat the publication of the two novels as a non-event. Recently, however, several feminist critics, with no reference to Ogot’s The Promised Land, have assigned paradigmatic status to Nwapa’s text. Thus according to Susan Andrade: ‘Efuru [is] the first published novel by an African woman and the text that inaugurates an African women’s literary history’ (97). It is ‘the “mother” text of (anglophone) African women’s literature’ (100).¹ In ordering my chapters, I have given priority to Ogot, partly because she has a legitimate claim to it in that she became a published author before Nwapa, with several of her short stories appearing in journals in the early 1960s.² I also hope to show that, in terms of the strategies of resistance it inscribes, The Promised Land, too, can be deemed a ⁴ ‘“mother text”’.

Ogot is the most forgotten of the women writers I examine. She also provides a particularly striking example of the invisibility of African women writers. Bernth Lindfors describes her as ‘Kenya’s best-known female writer’ (‘Interview’ 57). But as his own data on the canonical status of African authors shows, the title ‘best-known female writer’ is an empty epithet. For Ogot’s ranking on the first of Lindfors’s two tests is only twenty-ninth – whereas that of Kenya’s ‘best-known’ male writer, Ngũgĩ, is third (‘Famous Authors” 141–2); and she scores so poorly on his other test – where Ngũgĩ moves into second place – that her name doesn’t appear at all (‘Teaching’ 54–5).

Ogot has had a fairly productive career as a writer. She has to her credit two novels – The Promised Land and The Graduate (1980) – as well as three volumes of short stories – Land Without Thunder (1968), The Other Woman (1976), and The Island of Tears (1980) – in English. But the critical establishment as well as feminist critics have tended to ignore these works. Ogot has also produced a number of works in Dholuo. Of these, Oladele Taiwo states:

The writings in Luo – Ber Wat, Miaha, Aloo Kod Apul Apul, Simbi Nyaima – may be new to many outside Kenya, but they have proved extremely popular at home. For example, a recent dramatisation of Miaha in Luo-speaking areas of Kenya excited the people and showed to what extent drama could be used as a medium of transmitting indigenous culture. (128)

Miaha has recently been translated into English under the title The Strange Bride (1989).

Ogot’s stance on the language issue is not essentially different from Ngũgĩ’s. As early as 1968 she stressed the need for African writers from ‘an urban environment’ to attempt to bridge the ‘great cultural gulf’ which separates them from ‘the overwhelming majority of the population who live in the villages’ (‘African writer’ 37). And in 1983, she stated that she was prompted to start writing in her first language by her mother’s remark on the publication of The Graduate that ‘If only you could write in Luo you would serve your people well’. She also indicates that she has remained committed to writing in Dholuo so that her work can ‘be read by all my people’ and her language preserved and not ‘swallowed up by English and Kiswahili’ (Burness 60). Ogot’s decision has not, however, generated any of the interest or debate Ngũgĩ’s resolve did a few years earlier to begin writing in Gĩkũyũ. The debate has, in fact, been characterized as a wholly male affair, and Ogot’s act has been negated by the absence of critical commentary on it.

Speaking to Lindfors about how she and Ngũgĩ came to write their first novels, Ogot suggests that a kind of regional nationalism inspired them both when they were made aware at the 1962 Makerere conference on African literature of the relative ‘literary barrenness’ of East Africa (‘Interview’ 58). NguģT’s Weep Not, Child (1964) was much more widely reviewed than Ogot’s The Promised Land, possibly partly because it was the first novel by an East African to be published. It was also much more favourably received than The Promised Land, which was condemned by the critics. Charles R. Larson reviewed both books. Weep Not, Child he praises highly, referring to it as one of those ‘remarkable first novels’ (‘Things’ 64). Of The Promised Land he says, after having criticized Ogot for her handling of theme, plot, mood, dialogue, and character, that it is ‘one of the most disappointing African novels in a long time’ (Review 44). As is so often the case with mainstream criticism, the condemned text is one which attempts to subvert the manichean allegory of gender, while the one which is commended valorizes it. Weep Not, Child is a conventional male narrative – as Taban lo Liyong inadvertently reveals in his review when he contrasts the role of the male characters, the fathers and sons of the story, with that of ‘the mothers’. While the former engage in historical struggles, the latter, he observes, ‘are symbolic of “mother earth”: they give and preserve life and are wise’ (43). Or as Elleke Boehmer says of Ngũgĩ’s characterization of women in his first two novels: ‘We see here Ngũgĩ upholding the patriarchal order by establishing archetypal roles and patterns of relationships that will continue, albeit in transmuted form, into the later novels’ (‘Master’s dance’ 12–13).

The reviews of The Promised Land and the commentaries on it in overviews of East African literature display many of the trends that are evident in the criticism of African women’s writing. The supercilious tone Gerald Moore adopts in his review is typical of male critics’ attitude toward women writers. ‘Grace Ogot’, he opines, ‘would be advised to return to [the short story] form, which she has handled with some skill, and to abjure all attempts to give the visions of her essentially fantastic imagination a realistic dress’ (Review 95). Moore’s review also shows evidence of a careless reading, but Douglas Killam who, in his analysis, confuses, in name at least, the main male character of Ogot’s novel with its female protagonist, highlights the insensibility with which some (male) critics read women’s novels (126).

From the convention they adopt in naming Ogot, it is evident that Moore and Killam, as well as Larson, were actively aware of gender when they were reading her novel. For Ogot is always either ‘Grace Ogot’ or ‘Miss/Mrs Ogot’ (there is critical dissention over her marital status), whereas Ngũgĩ, whom Killam also mentions, is never ‘Mr Ngugi’, only occasionally ‘James Ngugi’, and almost always ‘Ngugi’. Such namings may look innocent, devoid of significance, but they, too, uphold the patriarchal order. The semantic rule underlying the convention is what Dale Spender refers to in her analysis of sexist bias in the English language system as the rule of ‘the male-as-norm’ (3). Masculinity is the unmarked form, the assumption being that writing is a male activity. Hence, while on first mention or for emphasis it might be ‘James Ngugi’, it is almost always simply ‘Ngugi’. Femininity is the marked form. In other words, the naming is gendered – ‘Grace/Miss/Mrs Ogot’ – to show a deviation from the norm. The convention therefore not only marks the woman writer for her gender; it also rebukes her for transgressing the norm by daring to take up the pen. Even more insidiously, it names her not a writer but a woman, the implicit message encoded in the naming being that it is marriage/motherhood that is her true vocation and not writing.

The rule of ‘the male-as-norm’ would also seem to underlie the critics’ readings of The Promised Land. All three critics complain of inconsistencies and improbabilities in the plot. ‘But, worse than that’, according to Moore, the story lacks ‘force and point’ as the male protagonist, Ochola, rather than being ‘a tragic figure’ is ‘merely a misguided one’ (Review 94); while for Larson the story’s ‘end destroys the mood of what could have been an idyllic memoir of African agrarian life’ (Review 44). But it is precisely such male literary representations as Moore and Larson evidently have in mind – Moore of the Okonkwo-type tragic hero and Larson of idealized, Mother-Africa-type evocations of the past such as Camara Laye’s The African Child – that The Promised Land (the title is ironic) challenges. The problem would seem to be, then, not that Ogot’s plot is improbable or pointless but that her narrative does not conform to the characteristics of the conventional male narrative.

It is, however, Maryse Conde, one of the few feminist critics to treat Ogot, who offers the most perverse reading of her writing. Conde, too, complains that Ogot’s stories lack credibility:

Grace Ogot lacks neither style nor imagination. But her talents are totally wasted. She is so blinded by her respect for the European codes of behaviour, so confused as to the place of her traditional beliefs, that her female characters possess neither coherence nor credibility…. She may believe that she is an emancipated woman ‘who reads books’ but what she offers her fellow-countrywomen is a dangerous picture of alienation and enslavement. One feels tempted to advise her to join some Women’s Lib. Movement to see how European females question the code of values and behaviour imposed upon them, and to replace her Bible by Germaine Greer’s book. (142)

In the advice she offers Ogot, Conde overlooks the cultural and historical specificity of western feminism which she represents as universal. Indeed, it would seem to be Conde herself who is ‘blinded by her respect for European codes of behaviour’. For at the same time as she condemns Ogot for adhering to western values (of which, in fact, as we shall see, Ogot is highly critical), she urges her to take western feminists as her model.

As Lloyd Brown observes, Conde’s reading of Ogot is also skewed by the prescriptive demands of the mode of feminist analysis she employs, the images mode, which requires that writers provide a positive role model for women:

The critic’s ideal of social equality or female independence ought not to distort or obscure the degree to which a writer, any writer, succeeds in depicting the less than ideal lives of women…. Conde seems to assume that an uncompromising realism is incompatible with a thorough-going commitment to the ideal of women’s equality. (11)

As this excerpt suggests, Brown’s own criticism is grounded in what Rita Felski calls ‘a reflectionist model’ (26), a mode of criticism which subscribes to the notion of representation as unmediated, and which measures a work by its ability to reproduce female experience realistically. As Felski observes, such a model is unable to account for the relation between literature, ideology, and the social domain or for the shaping influence of aesthetic structures (8–9,28). Brown also glosses over some of the subtleties of Ogot’s texts, but his analysis is, on the whole, perceptive, and I draw on it in the discussion of Ogot’s short stories and novels that follows.

The main ideological function of Ogot’s fiction is to undermine patriarchal ideology by means of a reversal of the initial terms of the sexual allegory. Such an inversion – female and male, good and evil, subject and object – does not resolve the problems of gender, but it is, nonetheless, a subversive manoeuvre. For it exposes the sexist bias of the male literary tradition and creates space for the female subject. As we shall see, inversion is a strategy that other women writers have also employed in their attempt to combat patriarchal manicheism.

In Ogot’s writing, inversion is effected in part by the designation of the national subject as explicitly female. Thus Ogot counters both colonial and African male representations of women as passive and ahistorical, as well as providing a critique of colonialism and indigenous patriarchy. I will briefly consider how this and Ogot’s other major strategy, the discrediting of the male subject, operate in a number of her short stories, as well as in The Strange Bride, before treating The Promised Land and The Graduate in some detail.

‘The old white witch’³ is set during colonial times at a mission hospital where male and female nurses are being trained under the supervision of Matron Jack, the ‘old white witch’ of the story’s title. Much to the Matron’s consternation, she finds that her female charges do not conform to the colonial definition of African womanhood:

She wished the African women folk were as obedient as their men. She had been told again and again that African men were little Caesars who treated their women like slaves. But why was it that she found the men co-operative and obedient? It was these headstrong females whom she found impossible to work with. (17)

As Nwapa also does in Efuru, in this story Ogot casts men in the role of colonial collaborators and portrays women as being foremost in offering resistance to colonial domination. But she is, in this respect, even more confrontational than Nwapa. For having designated women as subjects of African nationalism, she foregrounds their defiant action in her narrative.

The conflict centres on the Matron’s requirement that the female nurses conform to English hospital practice and administer bedpans, a ruling which the nurses resist as it contradicts the social conventions of their own cultural heritage which exempt women from what is quite literally the shit-work of their communities and would result, if adhered to, in their social ostracism. The Matron, however, who, in her validation of the racial allegory, epitomizes colonial society, insists that administering bedpans is the nurses’ Christian duty. ‘Having accepted Christ’, she says, ‘you must face the challenge and lead your people who are still walking in darkness and are governed by taboos and superstitions’ (10).

Although the male nurses and other African male members of the hospital staff are privately incensed with the Matron for ‘treating them like little children’ (20) and excluding them from administrative participation, they remain silent about their grievances and identify with the hospital authorities in the dispute. Echoing the sentiments of Matron Jack, their spokesman, the Reverend Odhuno, admonishes the nurses when they threaten to take strike action to ‘return to your rooms, change into your uniforms and continue to work in the Lord’s Vineyard’ (11). As he puts it to the other men: ‘We should give our missionaries support’ (16). By contrast, the female nurses under Monica’s leadership act to liberate themselves from ‘the iron rule’ of Matron Jack (18). Branding the men ‘traitors’ (9), they call a strike and decide to leave the hospital and return to their homes for its duration. For, Monica reasons: ‘Is it not true that [the Europeans] give orders while we work? Then let them carry urine and faeces – they will not do it for a week. When they are desperate … they will call us back, on our terms’ (13).

However, as is the case with Okonkwo, history is on the side of Monica’s adversaries, which makes a tragic ending to her story also inevitable. For colonial power relations do not permit the emergence of African national subjects of either gender. Monica falls ill while she is at home and her people take her to the hospital ‘against her wish’ (25). Having lost consciousness, the once ‘headstrong’ Monica is as ‘co-operative and obedient’ as her male colleagues have always been in the face of colonial authority. ‘[Y]ou can keep your Christianity’, she had once told Matron Jack (10), but the last sacrament, ‘the best parting gift that a dying Christian can receive’, is administered to her while she lies helpless, the object of the Matron’s ministrations. Regaining consciousness just before her death and recognizing that she has been defeated, she tells her mother to return home, for ‘I am staying with the Old White Witch’ (25).

In ‘Elizabeth’ it is post-independence patriarchal relations which reduce the story’s eponymous heroine to object status. Like several of the male-authored texts discussed in the previous chapter, ‘Elizabeth’ is a story of ‘post-colonial’ disillusionment. But Ogot counters the conventional male account of post-independence experience which, as we have seen, takes the primacy of the male subject for granted, with an account of women’s anti-national experience.

Because of sexual harassment, Elizabeth leaves her job first with an American and then with a European employer. Assured by the Labour Officer ‘that working for a fellow African with the country’s progress at heart would be different’ (199), she accepts the job she has been offered in Mr Jimbo’s office, hoping that she will now be able to contribute to national development. At first Jimbo seems like ‘an angel’ (196),a man who respects her for her abilities. But her claim to national subject-hood is soon thrust aside and she finds herself once again fixed in the male gaze. She is ‘loveable’, ‘beautiful’, ‘feminine’,Jimbo tells her (195–6). Then he rapes her.

Elizabeth’s final employer is Mother Hellena, a nun who runs an orphanage, the only kind of employer, Ogot bitterly implies, under whom a woman can work and maintain her integrity. But the damage has been done and Elizabeth hangs herself when she discovers she is pregnant. She is not, however, portrayed as a passive victim of male oppression. Her suicide is less an act of despair than one of defiance and vengeance, a means of reasserting her status as a subject. For Elizabeth is not voicele...