Creating the Archive of African Women’s Writing: Reflecting on Feminism, Epistemology, and the Women Writing Africa Project

This essay is a reflection of the monumental Women Writing Africa project by one of the project’s three editors. Over the course of two decades, the project published four volumes documenting the history of literary expression by African women throughout the continent, including the stories of dispossession that mark the harrowing start of the slave routes. This intimate account engages with the context of feminist praxis on the continent and the politics of African feminist research and publishing. Women Writing Africa was a project of cultural renewal that restored African women’s voices to the African canon and redrew the map of African literature. In their work, the editors and contributors confronted the intractable reductiveness around images of Africa—even within feminist circles—and addressed what it means to be “African” in the contemporary world. The editors’ hope was to generate new readings of Africa’s history by shedding light on women’s writing and, in doing so, change assumptions of how knowledge is shaped.