This course is premised on a central question: How have African women’s voices and images been shaped, heard, and/or represented in postcolonial Africa? The course seeks to enable students to understand ways in which contemporary African culture is being reconstructed through the restoration of women’s voices in the public sphere by African women writers and film makers. Particular attention is paid to the feminine point of view in ways that challenge the representation of women and their experiences in male-authored literatures and films in postcolonial Anglophone and Francophone Africa. Students read and critique several works by African female writers, watch films and documentaries by both female and male writers/producers, and explore changes in concepts such as “woman,” “wife,” and “mother” from contemporary African perspectives under the general rubric of “African Feminism”. But in this course we pay attention to Chinua Achebe’s perspective on the role of literature/artist in postcolonial Africa. On the charge that the African literary artist was too earnest, too political, Achebe argued that for the African artist, “art for art’s sake is just another deodorized dogshit” (1964; 1973:8). There will also be a serious analysis of indigenous African proverbs as they pertain to the female-male discourse.  

In this course we approach feminism in modern African literatures in line with Alice Walker’s coined word, “womanism”. Walker delineates this discourse in terms of complimentary relationships between women and men. The concept also draws a distinction between Western “bourgeois” feminism which is primarily satisfied with political changes that for the most part affected only the elite and did not affect their class privilege. The course thus essentially lifts up Walker’s line of thought evident in the writings of modern African women such as Chicwenye Ogunyemi. She has opined that, instead of denigrating (Black) manhood, womanism rather recognizes its collaborative potential, believes in him, and empowers him. Womanist writings would, therefore, almost always end in `integrative images of male and female worlds.’ Participants in the course will be led to assess Ogunyemi’s perspective that, “A Black woman writer is likely to be a `womanist’. That is, she will recognize that along with her consciousness of sexual issues, she must incorporate racial, cultural, national, economic and political considerations in her philosophy” (1985:64). Discussion of gender relations in modern African women’s writings is therefore understood as:     

• A specific response to indigenous and colonial (Islamic and Western) patriarchies.   
• An articulation of African women’s concerns through a medium—modern African literatures—originally dominated by men. 
• Located within the broader social and cultural contexts of African societies and shaped by political and economic interests.   
• Discrimination that African women experience and their strategies for coping with it.