Thiong’o Major Works
2.4. The Rise of the Manuscript and the Invisibility of Women
In the preface of Simone Kaya‘s work Les Danseuses d’Impe-Eya (1976), Cheikh Hamidou Kane sheds light on the position of women writers and writes: ―parmi ces enfants de l‘Afrique qui se sont livrés à l‘entreprise d‘écriture, les filles de l‘Afrique ont, jusqu‘à présent, figuré en très petit nombre‖ [among these children of Africa who have been engaged in writing, the daughters of Africa have, thus far, been small in number] 1 . Similarly, Arlette Chemain-Degrange (1980) highlighted the female condition in francophone African novels and then concluded by maintaining that, ―il n‘existe pas de femme, à l‘heure actuelle, qui ait pensé sa propre condition et donné à sa réflexion la forme d‘une fiction romanesque,‖ [At the present time, there is no woman who has thought about her own condition and put it a novelistic form.] (qtd. in Mutunda 43-4). A number of studies have proved that African women‘s written literature is young. They began to write during the 1950s. However, their production was sporadic until the 1970s when the female literary corpus took its shape and established its roots.
In essence, as the change was made from orality to written literature new perspectives for mastery in the written mode of expression emerged. There are three important factors which led to this change. Any investigation to list out these factors leads to the assumption that African women lost their position in literature due to the medium of communication, the cultural colonial aftermath which changed the social structure, and the conditions of publication. Jayant S. Cherekar posits that the factors which legitimated centrality shifted from those based upon age and sex to those based
1My own translation.
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upon knowledge of the colonizers‘ languages---English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese‖ (15). It should be argued that the tardiness of female literary creation dates back to the colonial era, when European colonialists privileged the schooling of males1. In this respect, they gave them the training they needed to carry out their colonial administrative policies. Women, therefore, were prevented from attaining the same educational level as men. Maryse Condé (1979) reinforces this idea and argues that: ―Comme dans un premier temps, [l‘]école [européenne] était réservée aux garçons, elle a introduit plus qu‘un fossé entre ―lettrés‖ et ―illettrées,‖ une division radicale entre les deux sexes‖(3) [Because, from the beginning, the (European)school was reserved for boys, it introduced more than a gap between literates men and illiterates women - a radical division between the sexes]. (qtd. in Mutunda 45)
Jayant S. Cherekar adds another important factor related to the sexual politics and Victorian ideals of colonial education which created a hierarchy, licensing ―men to virtually erase any presence of female‖ (15). Although regional and cultural specificities affected the degree of demotion, the position of African women was significantly compromised by the imposition of colonial institutions. Commenting on the effectiveness of colonial education in establishing the sexual inequalities, Ifi Amadiume, author of Male Daughters, Female Husbands, argues:
[w]hereas indigenous concepts linked to flexible gender constructions in terms of access to power and authority mediated dual-sex divisions, the new Western concepts carried strong sex and class inequalities supported by rigid gender ideology and constructions. (119)
Indeed, while the forced implementation of European governments, Western schools of thought, and religion were introducing these gender distinctions, the colonial government‘s educational systems were reinforcing them.
In ―Women Who Are Writers in Our Century: One Out of Twelve‖ Tillie Olsen states that the standard records of literary achievement—reviewers, textbooks—show eleven male writers for every one woman. Her explanation pervades feminist criticism and annoys some of its opponents. The fault, however, is not in women‘s biology but in
1 In ―A Study of Women in Zulu Sofola‘s Wedlock of the Gods and Tess Onwueme‘s The Broken Calabash‖ Julie Okoh shares this idea and writes:
It was the colonization, which to a high degree that upset the legal arrangement of Nigerian communities by the introduction of the nineteenth century European notions of patriarchy. As a result, the traditional system, which gave women the opportunity to exercise their rights in both private sphere and public domain, was disrupted (31).
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society‘s treatment of women, the cultural and religious devaluation, the lack of female literacy and education, and the conflict between work and family life. African women writers have had to endure the exclusion from the male-oriented African literary space. Despite the enviable position they occupied as oral artists, African women writers were not given the attention they deserved. Even after the rise of the feminist movement, the male voice continued to be dominant. Llyod Brown (1981) best expresses this dilemma in Women Writers in Black Africa by arguing that:
… interest in African literature continues to grow, and there is every reason to believe that the African writer will be heard and studied for a long time to come, as artist, social analyst, and literary critic. But in all of this, African literature has to be understood as a literature by African men, for interest in African literature has, with very rare exceptions, excluded women writers. The women writers of Africa are the other voices, the unheard voices, rarely discussed and seldom accorded space in the repetitive anthologies and the predictably male-oriented studies in the field. Relatively few literary magazines and scholarly journals, in the West and in Africa itself, have found significant space or time for African women writers. The ignoring of African women writers on the continent has become a tradition, implicit, rather than formally stated, but a tradition nonetheless--and a rather unfortunate one at that. (3) The rise of the manuscript limited the literary space devoted to the second sex. The conditions of publication complicated women‘s status. Obviously, female-authored works are alone in their subjection to gendered-based categorization; a fact that is indicative of the presupposition that literary authorship is an innately male preserve. Interviewed by Lindfors, Grace Ogot summarizes this situation out of the exaggerated conditions of publication during the colonial reign:
As far as book publishing was concerned, the East African Literature Bureau was ready to publish anything written in the mother tongue languages. They could also publish material in English, but at that time they did not encourage creative writing at all. I remember taking some of my short stories to the Manager, including the one which was later published in Black Orpheus. They really couldn‘t understand how a Christian woman could write such stories, involved with sacrifices, traditional medicines and all, instead of writing about Salvation and Christianity. (63)
In actual fact, women writers were excluded from anthologies and critical texts. Carol Boyce Davies‘ Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature sheds light on the historical background that has spawned the literary relationships between women writers and critics. In her essay entitled ―Feminist Consciousness and African Literary Criticism‖ she puts forth the claim that African literature was initially critiqued by
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―European academicians who communicated the Western, male-oriented mode of creating and evaluating literature‖ (2). Western critics were succeeded by male African authors who perpetuated the same phallocentric criticisms that were previously ascribed. In this respect, African literature was founded upon the marginalization of women‘s concerns.
Ama Ata Aidoo cogently described the problems that African women writers faced. During the Second African Writer‘ Conference held in Stockholm in 1986 and while presenting her paper entitled ―To Be an African Woman Writer: An Overview and a Detail‖, Aidoo explained how gender discrimination and the traditional roles assigned to women within patriarchal society played vital roles in the late arrival of women to the literary scene:
It is definite that anything that had to do with African women was of all vital pieces of information, the most unknown (or rather unsought) the most ignored of all concerns, the most unseen of all the visibles, and we might as well face it, of everything to do with humanity, the most despised. This had nothing to do with anything that women did or failed to do. It had to do with the politics of sex and the politics of the wealthy of this earth who grabbed it and who had it. (qtd.in Abbenyi and Makuchi 3)
Aidoo‘s commentary on the situation that African women lived by is a call for change. She beleives that like menwomen have the absolute right to be treated equally. Moreover, Aidoo urges crititcs to employ their energies and thus improve women‘s conditions.
African literature has been the stronghold of male reviewers and writers. According to Mikene Schipper, author of Beyond the Boundaries, ―literary criticism is primarily in the hands of male critics and since the critics determine who is and who is not an ‘important author‘, the status of a writer depends largely on their assessment‖ (qtd. in Stratton 3). In many ways, male authors‘ dominance in the acts of literary creation and evaluation has assigned minor roles to women. Cherekar views women‘s subordination as the outcome of colonialism which resulted in the imposition of rigid European definitions. Colonialism altered male-female power equations resulting in the detriment of women. This political development considerably altered the role of women restricting their position only to domestic tasks.
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The neglect of women‘s role in society extended even to the level of neglecting good female writers of excellence, who were not included in literary reviews and criticism. Women‘s invisibility in the African literary Canon longed for at five decades. It was until 1966 that Flora Nwapa published her first novel Efuru.Davies admits that as a result of the peripheralization of women that was imbedded in the literary criticisms the first female critics ―had to utilize the same critical apparta as their male contemporaries‖ (2). Women like Margaret Amosu, Molly Mahood, and Lilyan Kesteloot participated in the phallocentric criticisms and their works cannot be discussed far from those of their predecessors. Davies further suggests that inspite of the rise of female writers and feminist critics, the gender-based discrepancies in literary criticism still exist- the political significance of which Ama Ata Aidoo firmly illustrates. Exploring the history of African literature, with a particular emphasis on the colonial rule, suggests that earlier male authors were vigorously concerned and preoccupied with the task of glorifying their nation. By nature, African literature like any Third-world literature is characterized by its authors‘ nation-belonging. In a view of that, Fredric Jameson states that:
[t]hird-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic–necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual isalways an
allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-worldculture and society.
(―Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism‖ 69)
The projection of men in their writing is that of active citizens, whereas women are/were passive objects. Cherekar maintains that in male‘s writings ―women are used only as objects signifying and symbolizing men‘s honor and glory‖ (16). In
Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender Stratton assumes that
―[w]hether, it is Senghor‘s Negritude or Ngugi‘s social vision, woman‘s function is merely to embody man‘s vision. It also inevitably gave rise to woman as symbol, which often leads to stereotyping her roles in African male literature‖ (46). For these reasons, Cherekar puts forth the assumption that colonial African literature, therefore, is featured by its authors‘ insistence on ―the one-sided, prejudiced and unfair portrayal of women.‖ (15)
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