the challenge of feminism in keny a: towards an afrocentric worldview. submitted in accordance ...

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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
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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
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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.
I begin from the premise that it is not possible to arrive at the concept "African" without
first dealing with the many and diverse ethnic communities and other sectarian
groupings in the continent. In order to arrive at the "Afrocentric" it is important to pay
attention to the various parts that make up Africa. For this reason, chapter one of this
study looks at Kenyan consciousness seen in the context of specific communities. I
argue that we should think in terms of what I call concentric circles of consciousness,
where we begin with individuals as located in communities, that are in tum located in
ethnic groups and which combine to make up countries. I argue that it is through
concentric circles of consciousness that we can begin conceptual ising identity tags
such as Kikuyu, Kenyan, East African, African and so on. Chapter one is an attempt to
demonstrate the many ways in which Kenyans construct the self as well as an attempt
to use specific examples from specific communities to show how different communities
in Africa might begin to formulate their identities. The argument here is that that
identity is both cultural and geo-political. I believe that the same mechanics operative in
Kenya are largely applicable to many other African countries.
In chapter two I deal with why African women deny being feminist even when the
issues they are dealing with are explicitly feminist. While interviewing women in
I Note that throughout this thesis culture is taken as the all-encompassing term while tradition is used to
refer to the specific manifestations of culture. The two terms are therefore not taken as distinctively
different. I take the view that if feminism challenges and calls for abandoning of specific African
traditions, that should not necessarily be taken as challenging African culture(s}.
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Kenya, I found out that whether or not African women will embrace the term feminist is
very much dependent on the definition(s) attached to the term. Kabira (1998), for
example, argued that feminism in Africa has tended to be mainly associated with the
radical aspects of the American women's movement. Her argument is that if it were
seen as humanism that includes women, feminism would be acceptable to African
women. Chapter two argues, for purposes of this thesis, that feminism should be seen in
broad terms and specifically at two levels: 1) a consciousness that women universally
are oppressed and discriminated against on the basis of their sex, and the consequent
deliberate attempt to bring about equality; and 2) women's struggle against injustice
even when they are not conscious that they are fighting a universal practice. I find
Obioma Nnaemeka's (1998) argument that for African women, "to think feminist is to
act feminist"(5) appropriate for my definition here. Chapter two of this thesis also
argues that before inscribing African women as feminist, we need to examine the
concept in the context of its historicity and location in western culture as well as its
manifestation in traditional Africa prior to colonialism. Ifwe do that, we will be able to
see in what ways African women writers are building on or following in the footsteps of
their mothers and grandmothers. We can then begin to talk about Afrocentric feminism.
By Afrocentric we refer to the ability to celebrate being African without necessarily
being blind to the negative aspects of cultures and traditions of Africa. Being African
should of course be seen in a very wide sense that is not limited to geography, colour or
even specific cultures. This does not mean that geography, colour and culture are not
important to that definition, it only means that the absence of anyone of these aspects
does not necessarily exclude one from being African. Being African has to be seen in
the context of globalisation in the sense that the African self is defined first and
foremost from the perspective of the individual as located in specific communities that
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are culturally connected to geographical Africa, physically or metaphysically, and who
then identifies himself/herself as African in relation to the rest of the world.
The authors studied in this thesis are mainly Kikuyu or Luo. While there are more than
forty communities in Kenya, it is justifiable that Kikuyu and Luo should dominate this
thesis because they are the majority in the country, with the Kikuyu constituting nearly
a quarter of the total Kenyan population. The two communities also happen to have
produced Kenya's major writers, male or female. Chapter three, however, deals with
short stories that are more inclusive, with many more communities included in the list
of authors. The short stories were easy to pick because they are contained in two
anthologies, They Have Destroyed the Temple (1992) and Our Secret Lives: An
Anthology ofP oems and Short Stories by Kenyan Women Writers, (1990) both of which
came out of seminars on gender issues in Kenya. It is interesting that most of the stories
in these anthologies are first person narratives suggesting an intimacy between the
authors and their creations. I do not of course treat the stories, nor the longer narratives
of the other women writers, as autobiographical or even anthropological, but I do think
that all creative writing and all art is somehow connected to the real experience of its
author. I think it is correct to regard the issues that emerge out of the short stories as
constitutive of what Kenyan women would consider to be the burning issues of the day.
Indeed most of the stories in the two anthologies read less like creative writing than
documentation of personal suffering at the hands of a patriarchal society and of men in
particular. Most of the narratives have simple linear plots and are devoid of
artistic/stylistic complexity. It is possible to argue that the women have chosen this
mode of expression because it enables them to remain intimate with their own
experiences.