African Women Writing Resistance: An Anthology of Contemporary Voices

African Women Writing Resistance: An Introduction

African Women in the Twenty-first Century African women are too often presented in scholarly and media accounts as passive, pathetic victims of harsh circumstances, rather than as autonomous creative agents making positive changes in their lives. Confronting entrenched social inequality and inadequate access to resources, women across the continent are working with grit, determination, and imagination to improve their own material conditions and to blaze a strong, clear path for their daughters and granddaughters. The contributors to African Women Writing Resistance are at the forward edge of the tide of women’s empowerment that is moving across the African continent at the start of the twenty-first century. They look unblinkingly at the challenges they confront while also creating visions of a more positive future, using writing to bear witness to oppression, to document opposition struggles, and to share successful strategies of resistance. African women 3 African Women Writing Resistance An Introduction Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez with Pauline Dongala, Omotayo Jolaosho, and Anne Serafin writers such as those included in this collection are moving beyond the linked dichotomies of victim/oppressor and victim/heroine to present their experiences in full complexity. In many ways the twenty-first century is a good time to be a woman in Africa . African women, energized by the path-breaking 2005 victory of Liberian Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman president of any African nation, are educating themselves and entering politics and the professions in record numbers .1 Another trailblazing African woman, Wangari Maathai of Kenya, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her ambitious woman-based reforestation project, the Green Belt Movement.2 Gender mainstreaming are the new watchwords at the United Nations and other international development agencies, which are finally beginning to give women their due as the pillars of any society , particularly in periods of crisis or rapid development.3 Though still trailing in numbers and recognition behind older, more established male counterparts,4 African women writers have begun to appear on the world’s bestseller lists, with debut novels by women writers such as Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga and Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie building on the successes of previous generations of African woman writers,5 including Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria), Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghana), and Mariama Bâ (Senegal ).6 Africana studies is growing as an interdisciplinary academic field spanning Africa and the African diaspora and is increasingly taking women’s experiences and voices into account,7 as evidenced by the recent publication of collections such as the multivolume Women Writing Africa series, produced by a collective of editors and writers at the Feminist Press; African Gender Studies, edited by Oyeronke Oyewumi; and African Feminism: The Politics of Survival in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Gwendolyn Mikell. Still, there are many challenges for African women to confront. The scourge of HIV/AIDS has hit African women hard; their own rates of infection and death are high, and those who survive are left to care for the sick as well as for an ever-growing tide of orphaned children.8 Other health-related burdens exist as well: maternal mortality remains high throughout much of Africa, due to a lack of access to modern health care facilities,9 and other preventable diseases take their toll, including malaria, tuberculosis, and lesser-known but equally deadly and prevalent parasitical diseases, such as schistosomiasis, trachoma, river blindness, and elephantiasis.10 Though some women are beginning to gain social recognition and political power, the vast majority of African women remain undereducated11 and subject to patriarchal norms, both indigenous and imported, that keep them from reaching their full potential.12 Domestic violence remains a significant problem, along with marital rape and child marriage—all issues explored by contributors to this volume. Conflicts in African countries, such as Rwanda, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have too often relied on brutal tactics of ethnic warfare, 4 African Women Writing Resistance with the raping of girls and women of all ages commonplace and devastating.13 Conflict has also led to the displacement of millions of African women, who languish in refugee camps all over the continent,14 where they are often subject to sexual predation, in some cases by the very aid workers and peacekeepers who are supposedly there to help them.15 Sex work and sex trafficking are also increasingly important issues for African women, as several alarming recent reports make clear...