Gender Voices and Choices: Redefining Women in Contemporary African Fiction (review)

Gender Voices and Choices: Redefining Women in Contemporary African Fiction, by Gloria Chukukere. Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1995. Distributed by African Books Collective Ltd., 27 Park End Street, Oxford OX1 1HU United Kingdom.

Only in the past fifteen years have African women writers begun to receive serious critical attention. Earlier, critics had created and consolidated an exclusively male canon of "great" African writers whose work became a critical yardstick against which to judge all others. Besides establishing the critical norms, male writers also established the fictional norms for the representation of the African woman. According to Gloria Chukukere, contemporary African women writers, along with some men, have been challenging these norms in their fiction, redefining women with much more complexity.

In the introductory chapter of her book, a revision of her doctoral thesis, Chukukere summarizes the combined effects of colonialism, modernization, and indigenous and European colonial patriarchies on the roles and status of women in Africa today and outlines the differences between the representation of African women by male and female writers. Chapter two discusses the stereotyped portrayals of chapbook heroines in the popular fiction of Onitsha market literature, chapter three the heroines in Cyprian Ekwensi's novels as both a continuation and a complication of the same stereotypes, and chapter four the elevated portrayal of women by selected male writers, in works by Sembene, Abraham, Ngugi, and La Guma. The next four chapters treat the varied representations of women in the works of Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Grace Ogot, and Bessie Head. Chukukere concludes that African women writers challenge romanticized and stereotyped portrayals of women in earlier fiction by men. The women writers create three-dimensional female characters with strengths and weaknesses, and explore their frustrations as wives and mothers and their search for personal fulfilment in a rigid framework of social expectations and taboos.

Gender Voices and Choices acknowledges some benefits to African women from modernization, but also points out its deleterious effects on their social, political, and economic status, without denying the oppressive aspects of traditional patriarchies. Other useful features of the book include its detailed discussion of the fiction of Grace Ogot, an important but little-discussed Kenyan writer; its geographical scope (with chapters on Nwapa, Emecheta, Ogot, and Head and on Ekwensi and the major male writers Sembene, Abraham, Ngugi, and LaGuma, thus spanning three major regions of sub-Saharan Africa); its view of women's representation in popular, men's, and women's writing as a continuum, despite its focus on women's self-representations; and its survey of the literature and criticism by and on African women writers to 1983.

At the time Chukukere was writing her thesis, the only book-length studies that would have been available to her were Lloyd W. Brown's Women Writers in Black Africa (Westport: Greenwood, 1981) and Oladele Taiwo's Female Novelists of Modern Africa (New York: St. Martin's, 1984). In the past fifteen years, however, several such studies have emerged, the most recent being books by Florence Stratton (Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender, London: Routledge, 1994), Roopoli Sircar (The Twice Colonised, New Delhi: Creative Books, 1995), and Juliana A. Nfah-Abbenyi (Gender in African Women's Writing, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997), and essay collections edited by Stephanie Newell (Writing African Women, London: Zed, 1997) and Phanuel A. Egejuru and Ketu H. Katrak (Nwanyibu: Womanbeing and African Literature, Trenton: Africa World, 1997)--all, like Chukukere's, seeking to redress the relative neglect of African women writers and to redefine African women's image in literature. Chukukere, however, who at the time of publication was working as an advisor to the Imo State Government of Nigeria, appears to have done little updating of her thesis. The book, therefore, has no references past 1984, does not acknowledge new works by the major writers she discusses (not even mentioning Bessie Head's 1986 death), and shows little awareness...