African Women Writing Resistance: An Anthology of Contemporary Voices

“We Are Our Grandmothers’ Dreams”: African Women Envision the Future

Dr. Abena P. A. Busia Good afternoon, everybody, I’m very glad to see you all here.* We have with us today at our roundtable discussion some of the editors and contributors to this wonderful forthcoming volume, African Women Writing Resistance, who are going to share with us their visions for a future for Africa and especially for Africa’s women. This is very important because, as those of us who work in African studies know, most of the time we’re struggling against the tides of the past, and nobody thinks of us as having a future. Certainly nobody thinks of African women as being able to envision a future, so this is important work we will be engaging in today. Our plan is that each of the panelists will say a few words about the topic, and then we will have an open discussion. 295 “We Are Our Grandmothers’ Dreams” African Women Envision the Future Pauline Dongala, Marame Gueye, Omotayo Jolaosho, Nimu Njoya, and Abena P. A. Busia *Roundtable transcribed and edited by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez. Omotayo Jolaosho I’m from the Yoruba tribe, and there is a Yoruba proverb about the necessity of looking into the past to envision the future. Translated, the proverb goes, “It is only a child who will keep moving forward when she has fallen; the adult will look back to identify the source of her downfall.” This proverb highlights the contribution of the past to present circumstance and its crucial role in the visioning process. It tells us, somewhat counterintuitively, that confronting the past is necessary in order to move forward successfully, in order not to be like that child who, though moving forward, continually falls and thus only achieves a staggered progress. That word, progress, is one I have been thinking about a lot lately. It is one of several words key to the discussion at hand—what would progress mean for women of Africa? I am not here to provide an answer but to offer some reflections on this question. As one of four editors of the anthology African Women Writing Resistance, I am in possession of a collection of texts carrying the voices of various contemporary African women. These texts serve as a precious resource for me, because I myself as an African woman recognize the themes that have been recorded in these writings. Pervasive in some of the writings is a sense of what W. E. B. Du Bois has termed double consciousness. Describing the psychological state of Africans in the American diaspora, he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk: “[T]wo souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”We hear echoes of this description in the words of anthology contributor Diana Mafe, a contemporary mixed-race woman born to a Dutch mother and Nigerian father, who writes about the difficulty of finding her place in the world today: I had been reduced to something one-dimensional and inadequate. . . . A white man called me “nigger,” a black woman made me kneel. But both read me according to their own rigid ideas about race, gender, and culture before quickly trying to put me in my “appropriate”place. . . . My place, regardless of citizenships, languages, or accents, may forever be in flux. . . . So I will settle on three things that I know to be firm amid the flux and that represent my own personal resistance, whether to a white man or a black woman, for oppression crosses all boundaries. I write as a woman, I write as a woman of color, and, simply, I write. For Mafe, writing is the source of dogged strength that keeps her from being torn asunder, the anchor amid the flux. That she has resigned herself to forever being in flux raises the question of whether reconciliation is possible for 296 Part Seven. Standing at the Edge of Time women like Diana Mafe, whom Audre Lorde calls the hyphenated people of the diaspora. Like Diana Mafe, I was born and raised in Nigeria, but I have lost a sense of home. I have spent the past eleven years in the United States. Two years ago, when I returned to Nigeria for a visit, a friend told me that I was Nigerian by name and passport but I was not really Nigerian. In my re...