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The Challenge of Feminism in Keny A: Towards an Afrocentric Worldview

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The Challenge of Feminism in Keny A: Towards an Afrocentric Worldview THE CHALLENGE OF FEMINISM IN KENY A: TOWARDS AN AFROCENTRIC WORLDVIEW. SUBMITTED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY. UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS SCHOOL OF ENGLISH BY KURIA, JOHN MIKE MUTHARI NOVEMBER 2001 THE CANDIDATE CONFIRMS THAT THE WORK SUBMITTED IS HIS OWN AND THAT APPROPRIATE CREDIT HAS BEEN GIVEN WHERE REFERENCE HAS BEEN MADE TO THE WORK OF OTHERS. Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been completed without the assistance and co-operation I got from many people whose list I cannot possibly exhaust here. A few, however, deserve specific mention. I would like to extend special thanks to Daystar University for providing the financial assistance without which this thesis would not even have begun. May God expand and multiply you and may you live up to your motto, being a day star in Africa and beyond. I am grateful to my supervisor, Dr Jane Plastow, who has proved that Ph.D studies need not be a pain and that Wordsworth was right when he said that knowledge is pleasurable even when it's the knowledge of pain. It was great working with you. Thank you Prof Senanu and Dr Michael Payne for being great academic mentors to me. I am indebted to the following Kenyan women writers, Grace Ogot, Rebeka Njau, Margaret Ogola, Leah Muya, Pat Ngurukie, Wanjiku Kabira and Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, for giving me a chance to interview them on a range of topics related to this thesis. Thank you all for availing yourselves in spite of your busy schedules. John Muri Macharia, you were God sent, thanks for taking care of the kids when I could not be there for them. Manel Herat, thank you for helping with editing, the bibliography, and useful comments on the whole thesis. Christine Matzeke, thank you for the encouragement and for being there when I needed to mourn. Susan Kiguli, you ran away to South Africa in search of a Zulu man when I needed you most, but thanks for your help while you were around. Dr Rob Ward, you proved that even in an individualistic society there are social human beings, thank you for those early cups of tea. Dan Owino, Levi Obonyo and Bernard Boyo were my telephone pals who, though miles away, provided a great source of community and encouragement. And finally I must say a big thank you to my wife, Gillian, for bearing with me when hard toil made me dispassionate and unavailable. Thanks for taking care of things in my absence. DEDICATION Dedicated to my Mum for protecting Dad, to Dad who never lay a finger on mum and to my twin daughters, Ivy Njeri and Daisy Wanjiru to whom the future belongs. Abstract This study deals with African women's literature, and specifically creative writing by Kenyan women, in the context of feminism and Afrocentricity. In the words of Obioma Nnaemeka (1995) critics of African women's literature have tended to rename, misname or silence women's voices in an attempt to make them fit into a feminist! Afrocentricity either or mould. This thesis argues that when attention is paid to African women themselves, and the cultures from which and within which they write, it is clear that they embrace both feminism and Afrocentricity. By feminism I refer to African women's vision and activism for sexual equality and women's liberation while by Afrocentricity I am thinking of their commitment and pride in their African cultures and traditions. The first chapter argues that Kenyan women, in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial times, have been active and voiced in their stance against oppression of any kind. In the second chapter, I explore the relationship between feminism and Afrocentricity in a wider sense. I pay attention to the ways in which the two concepts have manifested themselves in Africa and her Diaspora as well as in the western world .. In chapter three, domestic violence, rape, poverty, and a gender insensitive legal and judiciary system are the dominant issues of concern to short stories writers from Kenya. In the fourth chapter, Ogot is seen as a liberal Afrocentric feminist in her call for African women to create room for themselves within African systems of thought and practice. Chapter five, on Oludhe Macgoye, argues that to be Afrocentric is cultural rather than racial. In Chapter six Rebeka Njau and Margaret Ogola are seen as Afrocentric while Tsitsi Dangarembga and Alice Walker are seen as Eurocentric. The thesis concludes that feminism in practice is not necessarily an occidental phenomenon. An African woman writer can be both feminist and Afrocentric. Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................. 1 Women and Kenya consciousness ....................................... 11 Feminism and Afrocentricity .............................................. 53 In their Voices: Short Stories by Kenyan Women ...................... 98 Grace Ogot: The Making of a Liberal Afrocentric Feminist. ......... 138 Narratives of Pain: Kenyan Women's History in Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye's Fiction ........................................................... 187 Beyond Colour: The Euro-Afrocentric Debate .......................... 226 Conclusion .................................................................... 278 Bibliography ........................................................... , ...... 287 Primary texts .......................................................... 297 Interviews ............................................................... 299 Introduction In her article titled "Feminist criticism and the African novel" Katherine Frank (1984) asks: " ... how can we rescue and re-evaluate people like Nwapa and Aidoo and Ogot from the parentheses and footnotes of male oriented and male authored African literary history"(44)? She then goes on to say that "[a] systematic attempt to answer such questions ... would result in an invaluable contribution to both African and women's studies, and would go a long way towards establishing a peculiarly African kind of feminist criticism"(44). Frank's diagnosis of the problem in African women's literature is accurate but one sided. It seems to suggest that African women's literature has only suffered at the hands of men. In 1984 when Frank was writing her article, Florence Stratton's (1994) Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender had not yet been published and Frank herself had not yet published her 1987 article, "Women without men: The feminist novel in Africa", in which she argues that the African woman's novel is more feminist than its western counterpart because African women's fiction calls for a separatist world, a world in which there are no men. Katherine Frank may therefore not have been able to "see" as Kolawole (1997) does that there is a need for "African women ... to force their voices into existing male and western feminist discourse ... (6)". Frank had probably not heard of the many African women writers such as Ogot (1998), Njau (1998), Macgoye (1998), Emecheta in Nnaemeka (1997a), and many others who insist that they should not be inscribed as feminists. However, although she does not acknowledge that African women writers are caught between western feminist critical interpretations and a male dominated African literary criticism, the problem she raises is nevertheless fundamental to the study of African women's literature. In this thesis, my interpretation of African women's fiction is driven by the conviction that African women's voices need to be factored into the reading of gender issues in African literature. I feel that the African woman's voice has been either 2 silenced, ignored, or mis-represented precisely because the dominant discourses on the subject of gender in Africa have either been by African male or by western female writers. African male writers, having previously encountered western feminist theories, have generally assumed that African women writers would emulate their western counterparts. The male critics therefore tend to castigate women writers for aping western values that are inconsistent with African realities. On the other hand, western women have ascribed to African women's literature the kind of rhetoric they (western women) would like to hear from African women rather than what the African women actually say. It is in this context that I understand Nnaemeka's (1995) argument that African male literary critics as well as western feminist theorists tend to "rename, misname, and silence"(80) African women's literary voices. In as much as one might argue that this study is equally part of the existing African male discourses on African women, my thesis is an attempt to listen to African women. I therefore interviewed all the major Kenyan women writers whose works I have examined in this thesis, not to make them tell me the meaning of their own works but to seek their ideas on the subject of feminism/gender issues or women's liberation in Africa. I discovered that contrary to views articulated by men, especially in newspapers, suggesting that African women were imbibing western values, that they were in opposition to marriage, motherhood, homemaking and other traditionally constructed feminine roles, the women's major concerns were much broader, with equal opportunities to education, job markets, national resources, health and others being central to their agenda. Indeed, many of them seemed to think that some aspects of African socialisation are as hostile to men as they are to women. After the interviews I felt even more convinced that the antagonism sometimes evident between the sexes in Africa in regard to equality has more to do with misreading, or failure to read at all, African women's voices, than it has to do with what the women actually say. At the same time it became clear that the issues the 3 women are concerned with are the very same ones that feminists across the world have been and are still dealing with. In this thesis I have endeavoured to demonstrate that feminism defined as the struggle against gender inequity, need not be antagonistic or in opposition to Afrocentricity. By Afrocentricity I mean the ability to construct reality from an African perspective, which invariably includes pride in African cultures 1.
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