Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez, Pauline Dongala, Omotayo Jolaosho, Anne Serafin, eds. African Women Writing Resistance: An Anthology of Contemporary Voices. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010. xxi + 337 pp. $26.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-299-23664-9; ISBN 978-0-299-23663-2.

Reviewed by Kathleen Sheldon (University of California, Los Angeles)
Published on H-Africa (January, 2011)
Commissioned by Brett L. Shadle (Virginia Tech)

Words from African Women

Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez and her colleagues have gathered over thirty short items written by African women that address women’s resistance.  Opening and closing with poems by Abena Busia, the collection is broad-ranging in theme and style, with poetry and short fiction alternating with essays and interviews.  While contributors address women’s experiences in tradition (their word), marriage, health, the environment, war, and exile, there is surprisingly little on conventional political resistance.  As the editors claim in their introduction, the authors “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” (p. 3).  As I read through the collection, however, it felt increasingly like a catalog of oppression, as the authors bore witness to women’s struggles but offered too little evidence of opposition or strategies of resistance.  Nonetheless, the collection offers access to unknown authors, many of them representing a younger generation of African women, who are confronting both local practices that endanger women as well as oppressive global forces.

The contributions are divided into thematic sections, beginning with stories that present women “engaging with tradition.”  That section includes a didactic story by Eve Zvichanzi Nyemba about a fictional princess who fights to win back the land that had been her grandfather’s.  Another entry in this section is an interview by Pauline Dongala with Elizabeth Bouanga, a woman from Congo-Brazzaville who refused to marry an in-law when her husband died, and went on to raise her nine children and her co-wife’s five children on her own. 

The second section continues the theme of the first, through the lens of sexuality.  The first essay is a report from Sibongile Mtungwa, a South African woman who was able to resist marriage to a man she did not love, though they had engaged in a traditional premarital relationship and he had begun to pay bridewealth to her family.  She tells how she had been abducted and coerced, and how her grandmother became the key person who supported her refusal to accept an unwanted marriage.  Both Mtungwa and Catherine Makoni, the Zimbabwean author of the next piece, are active in women’s rights organizations, where they have found assistance from colleagues and friends and have benefited from learning about the law.  But I confess to being puzzled by the editors’ decision to include Mamle Kabu’s “Story of Faith,” which chronicles the trajectory of a college student who begins to go with “sugar daddies,” older men who buy her material goods in exchange for sex.  She eventually becomes a call girl.  The story does address the topic of young women and sexuality, but there is little or no evidence that her story is one of resistance.  Other contributions to the section on young women and sexuality include a poem about father-daughter incest, and two brief entries on lesbianism in Cameroon and Uganda.

The section entitled “Challenging the Institution of Marriage” looks at such practices as polygamy and women’s loss of inheritance rights upon the death of a husband.  The contribution on polygamy presents a Wolof ritual known as xaxar in which a second wife is greeted by scurrilous songs sung by the first wife and her relatives and friends.  The intent of that custom is to remind the new wife that she is a potentially disruptive force in an existing household.  The author, Marame Gueye, is Senegalese and she participated in the ceremony she describes.  She believes the songs are becoming increasingly negative, and she comments that the women in the two camps resort to physical fighting more often now than in the past.  Gueye includes and analyzes the lyrics of several songs, and concludes that the songs “are definitely a way of asserting women’s resistance to the institution of polygamy,” while questioning whether they are “enough to establish a consistent and practical female response to the numerous oppressive factors that come with sharing a man” (p. 166). 

Iheoma Obibi’s story, “They Came in the Morning,” narrates the account of a newly widowed Nigerian woman who is visited by her late husband's relatives, who arrive in hopes of taking her inheritance.  She is protected by an older woman neighbor who sits with the family in order to keep an eye on their activities; but the most important factor was the will left by her husband that clearly named his wife as the heir.  Ellen Mulenga Banda-Aaku’s story, “Ngoma,” is about a Zambian woman who went to a traditional healer when she could not become pregnant and had sexual relations with the healer that resulted in a child, but whose husband still acquiesced to pressure from his family and married a second wife.  The protagonist eventually left her marriage, and comments, “I am no heroine.  I did not stand up and walk away from an abusive situation.  I was ejected from my marriage by circumstances beyond my control....  But I am free now, and I am happy” (p. 139).  I had difficulty in seeing either of these stories as models of female resistance, though they were compelling accounts of women’s subjugation to what are termed traditional practices.

The next section turns to issues related to health, including female genital cutting, HIV/AIDS, and the negative impact of trauma related to war and violence.  Janine Lewis offers a modernistic theater piece written collaboratively in a class she teaches at Tshwane University in South Africa, in which a young girl resists the Xhosa practice of virginity testing.  Makuchi (Cameroonian writer Juliana Nfah-Abbenyi) includes a moving story, “Slow Poison,” about a mother watching her adult son die from AIDS, as she reviews his history of promiscuous sexual encounters.  Pauline Dongala provides a short essay on how prayer and meditation helped her recover from her experience of war in Congo-Brazzaville and her time as a refugee. 

War continues as a theme of the section, “Women as Activists against War, Environmental Degradation, and Social Conflict.”  As the editors state explicitly, “The contributors to this section use writing as a tool of activism” (p. 219).  The topics include Nathalie Etoké’s poem on Rwanda, an excerpt from a novel by Khadija Marouazi about a male political prisoner in Morocco, and an essay by Sokari Ekine on the degradation of the Niger Delta by oil companies and local responses to that appalling situation.  However, I was perplexed by the inclusion of an extract from a memoir by China Keitetsi, a former child soldier in Uganda, who writes about feeling empowered by her use of weapons, “For the first time on Ugandan soil women were armed and walked as proudly as any man” (p. 258).  Allowing women equal access to military training is an important factor in women’s overall equality in society, but I cannot understand how being a child soldier, whether one is a girl or a boy, is in any way a positive feminist example.  The most pro-active piece in this section on women as activists is an interview with Wangari Maathai by Danielle Nierenberg and Mia MacDonald, dating from 2003, before Maathai had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  Maathai’s message is in the title: “Don’t Get Mad, Get Elected!”

The final section includes material on exile and diaspora, and the entries again range across a variety of styles.  Ghanaian Kuukua Dzigbordi Yomekpe writes about the decision to use her Akan and Ewe names in a series of selections from a memoir in progress.  Touria Khannous has an essay about her changing ideas on how to retain her Moroccan Muslim identity while living overseas in the United States.  Diana Adesola Mafe and Susan Akono each write about the impact of negative comments by Africans and non-Africans that caused them to reflect deeply on their identity as Africans.  The final entry is a transcription of a roundtable held at Rutgers University in 2007 that brought together several of the women who collaborated on this volume, at which they further discussed their “visions of the past, present, and future.”  The inclusion of materials from African women living overseas is notable, but the primary focus on Anglophone writers (twenty-five of the thirty-three total articles), especially those from Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Ghana, limits the continental breadth of the anthology.

Too many of the entries focus on describing the oppression that African women have experienced, with too little focus on positive responses to the difficult situations.  While I appreciate that the editors wanted to include a range of styles, the shift in tone from poem to interview to essay, and including some unusual choices such as a classroom skit and a series of emails from a Zimbabwean woman to her younger cousin, often seemed disjointed and clumsy.  That structure might have worked better if the material that was included actually exemplified resistance, which was not the case.   

As with many edited collections, the end result does not cohere, though there are interesting, intriguing, and insightful contributions to be found.  The awkward nature of the collection is also seen in the quality of the writing, which varies a great deal.  Some entries I found didactic and tedious, while others were more engaging.  Several essays or interviews carried the heavy weight of imparting a lesson about women’s oppression and defiance--important information without a doubt, but reading those pieces was like reading a political tract.  In a collection in which the act of writing was at times the only form of resistance, the quality of that writing becomes even more crucial to making the opinions of the writers accessible.  More successful were the pieces that conveyed the personal intensity of women’s oppression, and that suggested a way forward that was not simply a single woman’s route out, but a path that could be more widely adopted.  Because of the personal nature of many of these contributions, they offer an entrée into African women’s lives that will be enlightening as well as comprehensible to students.   

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-africa.

Citation: Kathleen Sheldon. Review of Browdy de Hernandez, Jennifer; Dongala, Pauline; Jolaosho, Omotayo; Serafin, Anne, eds., African Women Writing Resistance: An Anthology of Contemporary Voices. H-Africa, H-Net Reviews. January, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30973

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