Table Of ContentWOMEN, LITERATURE AND
DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA
This book is a powerful exploration of the role of women in the evolution of
African thinking and narratives on development, from the precolonial period right
through to the modern day. Whilst the book identifies women’s oppression and
marginalization as significant challenges to contemporary Africa’s advancement, it
also explores how new written narratives draw on traditional African knowledge
systems to bring deep-rooted and sometimes radical approaches to progress.
The book asserts that Africans must tell their own stories, expressed through the
complex meanings and nuances of African languages and often conveyed through
oral traditions and storytelling, in which women play an important role. The book’s
close examination of language and meaning in the African narrative tradition
advances the illumination and elevation of African storytelling as part of a viable
and valid knowledge base in its own right, rather than as an extension of European
paradigms and methods.
Anthonia C. Kalu’s new edition of this important book, fully revised throughout,
will also include fresh analysis of the role of digital media, education, and religion
in African narratives. At a time when the prominence and participation of
African women in development and sociopolitical debates is growing, this book’s
exploration of their lived experiences and narrative contribution will be of interest
to students of African literature, gender studies, development, history, and sociology.
Anthonia C. Kalu is a professor in the Department of Comparative Literature
and Foreign Languages and Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the
University of California-Riverside, USA.
Rethinking Development
Rethinking Development offers accessible and thought-provoking overviews of con-
temporary topics in international development and aid. Providing original empiri-
cal and analytical insights, the books in this series push thinking in new directions
by challenging current conceptualizations and developing new ones.
This is a dynamic and inspiring series for all those engaged with today’s debates
surrounding development issues, whether they be students, scholars, policy makers
and practitioners internationally. These interdisciplinary books provide an invalu-
able resource for discussion in advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses
in development studies as well as in anthropology, economics, politics, geography,
media studies and sociology.
Participatory Arts in International Development
Edited by Paul Cooke and Inés Soria-Donlan
Energy and Development
Frauke Urban
Power, Empowerment and Social Change
Edited by Rosemary McGee and Jethro Pettit
Innovation for Development in Africa
Jussi S. Jauhiainen and Lauri Hooli
Women, Literature and Development in Africa
Anthonia C. Kalu
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com
WOMEN, LITERATURE
AND DEVELOPMENT
IN AFRICA
Second Edition
Anthonia C. Kalu
Second edition published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Anthonia C. Kalu
The right of Anthonia C. Kalu to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
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registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Africa World Pr 2001
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-13652-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-13653-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-02779-6 (ebk)
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CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1 The African woman and African literary criticism 13
2 African literary theory and research 30
3 Paradigms of tradition and modernity: (Re)centering
women in African literature 56
4 Nwanyibuife: Women and the social construction
of gender in African development 75
5 Language and development in Africa 95
6 Ala: Gendered space and development in Africa 111
7 Women, narrative traditions and African religious thought 130
8 Women, education and the African narrative 153
Conclusion: how shall we sing their strange songs
in our homelands? 176
Bibliography 190
Index 198
INTRODUCTION
For most Western-educated Africans, entering the literate world through a non-
African language base creates a yearning for the familiar, the oral traditions. Conse-
quently, the initial encounter with African literature is a cause for celebration and a
homecoming.1 Frequently, the desire is simply for the occasional proverb that will
clarify the need for the struggle to learn the non-African language that paves the
way to European-based higher-learning and job opportunities. Early African writ-
ers’ response to this phenomenon was to introduce African verbal art traditions and
formats into African literature, thus validating their efforts to tell the African story
from an indigenous viewpoint. Seeing literature as a cultural and political change
vehicle, they used new narrative forms like the novel to address the vestiges of
colonial domination that tend to obstruct understanding about indigenous issues,
especially African knowledge systems. This aspect of African literature’s narrative
vision is sustained by the need to use writing to record, understand and clarify the
challenges of a continent in transition. It upholds and extends familiar perspectives
from traditional knowledge bases.
Contemporary African literature brings the new dispensation into focus by
reclaiming and adapting familiar discussions about individual and communal devel-
opment from African ways of knowing. I define African ways of knowing as a cohe-
sive and coherent body of knowledge emanating from African observations about
African life and experience. These observations include norms and rules about
the dynamics of individual and community life and relationships between com-
munities, i.e., development. Focusing on African cultures and arts as significant
indigenous depositories of knowledge, this work’s methodology and conclusions
emanate from Africa’s dependence on norms, rules and values that are supported
by oral traditions.
Specifically, the oral narrative tradition contributes to the uniqueness of con-
temporary African literature. While oral narrative performance arts are no longer
2 Introduction
consistently taught to children, the contents of the oral narrative tradition remain
significant to the transmission and maintenance of attitudes and values about
change in post-independent Africa. This function is manifested in the retention of
core statements about essential relationships in relevant aspects of African arts, cul-
ture and life. I use familiar statements from selected works in contemporary African
literature to explore the extent to which traditional African ways of knowing are
retained and implemented in post-independent Africa. By exploring these core
statements from African thought about the human condition, my hope is to expand
the boundaries of African literary criticism in the way that the core statements
themselves extend the boundaries of literature and the practice of literary criticism.
Although narrative forms like the novel and the short story facilitate exploration
of African life and experience, they have also shielded those aspects of African cul-
ture that do not lend themselves easily to transformation. This is especially true of
works by Nwapa and Mariama Ba, which retain significant aspects of women’s nar-
rative styles and formats. However, these works are frequently2 treated as responses
to a dominating grand-patriarchal norm than as contributions to vibrant cultural
and artistic legacies. This failure of African narrative traditions in transition to ini-
tiate transfer of recognizable discursive formations from female-based knowledge
maintains neutral zones in post-independent African thought about development.
Women, Literature and Development examines those detached cultural zones for tradi-
tional statements about development potential and practice in African life.
I use a multidisciplinary framework to show that contemporary African lit-
erature ensures continuity between Africa’s precolonial and contemporary devel-
opment projects. This approach consolidates various dominant theoretical and
analytical perspectives that have been used separately to explore Africa’s entry and
participation in the international arena. While this approach facilitates in-depth
examination of African verbal arts, it also re-embeds women in ongoing discussions
about the search for feasible paradigms for Africa’s development. By continuing
Africa’s verbal arts traditions, contemporary African literature maintains identifiable
linkages between African ways of knowing and the African landscape.
Contemporary African literature’s multivoiced approach to narration, explora-
tion and analysis paved the way for the development of multidisciplinary approaches
to African scholarship and research. Though reminiscent of African oral traditional
approaches to problem solving,3 this method has been largely ignored in efforts to
implement a national agenda for stability and advancement. Probably Africa’s big-
gest dilemma, stability and progress remain elusive for post-independent Africans
in an international arena that cannot wait indefinitely for Africa to settle intellec-
tual debts accruing from colonialism and consequent economic, political and social
decline.
Specifically, African narrative traditions offer tremendous opportunities for a
definitive investigation of traditional African statements about women and social,
economic and political progress. Using a traditional Igbo (African) standpoint that
acknowledges duality in existence, I argue that such opportunities can be moored
to existing knowledge bases for further exploration, analysis and implementation.
Introduction 3
Female-based knowledge in African societies and cultures is analyzed for its capac-
ity to inform development issues that are seen as providing unique intersections
between women’s lives and their participation in contemporary Africa.
Contemporary written African literature’s engagement of sociopolitical issues
urges both readers and literary critics to look beyond the analyses of develop-
ment slanted in favor of male characters and situations. The narrative visions of
these early works also discourage responses that urge a change in focus toward
more emphasis on women. Rather than adapting the holistic aesthetics and critical
approaches of African oral narrative traditions to advance African thought about
African knowledge, contemporary constructions of knowledge tend to focus atten-
tion on the adoption of current techniques of new and foreign cultures. On the
level of intellectual inquiry, history and development, the effect of this approach on
African thought is comparable to the experiences of postcolonial African elite who
purchase modern imported work- and time-saving appliances and gadgets. Fre-
quently, those gadgets deteriorate from lack of use because of inadequately devel-
oped (not malfunction of ) systems for the maintenance and distribution of public
power supplies. Unlike the traditional African, the postcolonial African elite lacks
access to a competent middle class whose aspirations reflect the ideals of the com-
munity. This means that most post-independent African nations neglect the need
to re-create and maintain the middle class on the assumption that their needs can
be imported. The practice of importing concrete items as well as abstract ideas for
this dynamic group in society is part of the continent’s legacy of colonization’s
requirements to import everything from education to religion. After Independence,
the impact of this phenomenon is most evident in the redirection of individual and
communal efforts toward the acquisition of the trimmings of the new dispensation
and its elusive promises for advancement. Contemporary African literature identi-
fies this situation as the identity question.
On the community and individual ethnic levels, the disarticulation between
deeply rooted African traditions and the new dispensation results in internal con-
tradictions. At the inter-ethnic and national levels, it stifles development projects
and national unity. In predominantly oral-based cultures, underdeveloped mainte-
nance systems reflect undeveloped oral discursive modes. Ignoring and/or negat-
ing such modes make it difficult, even impossible, for individuals, communities
and nations to imagine productive beginnings as well as outcomes. Regarding the
imported appliances referred to earlier, the absence of discussion about their neces-
sity in African life and experience makes it difficult to visualize the development of
maintenance, modification or innovation strategies.
Although most scholars acknowledge that writing fiction was the popular
choice for educated Africans for a long time, the underlying reasons and effects
of that choice needs further exploration. A major concern here is the initiation of
an effective approach to reentering African ways of knowing about development
and change. While interest in African development itself is not new, most efforts
from the colonial era to the present begin from the outside and emphasize the con-
struction of physical structures. While it is important and necessary, that emphasis
