Feminist Knowledge | Review Essay: African Feminist Studies: 1980-2002

Life Histories, Oral Narratives and Biographies

Western feminism, especially through publishing houses like the Women's Press and Virago inaugurated a bold tradition of women's first-person narratives and biography. This tradition was pivotal to the consciousness-raising and validation of women's experiences during the early years of the women's movement. The political value of these sorts of narratives is evident in many African feminists' calls for "herstory". But a biographical tradition of herstory in Africa has been substantially different from a western one, in which a focal concern was to connect the private and public levels of experience in women's lives, and to reassess conventional western perceptions of private life as being insignificant and feminine. The idea, rooted in Western philosophical dualisms, that privacy is linked to femininity and that public life is generally masculine has long been questioned as a universal formulation of gendered experience. As the research on African feminism, women and the economy, women in politics and women's history so clearly reveals, private and public spheres have been connected in very distinctive ways for African women. The subject-matter of African women's personal narratives therefore differs considerably from that of the western feminist tradition of biography.

Another feature of the African women's biographical tradition is its bifurcated legacy. At present, life history and biography are shaped by personal narratives, biographical constructions and oral histories that feature primarily as components of historical interpretation. On another level, it has been marked by biographies and autobiographies, written and published mainly within Africa, that emphatically centre around the life experiences and interpretations of experiencing subjects.

1. Life History in Historical Research

The value of life histories of women in relation to historical research on the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods offers a form of "history from below" in addressing experiences or perceptions that are often glossed over or excluded in historical research on momentous events, large-scale processes and prominent (usually male) figures of historical agency. This value has been demonstrated in relation to Marcia Wright's Strategies of Slaves and Women (1993) which, by offering women's mediated stories, uncovers the views and strategies of slave women during a period of great political change and insecurity; White, in The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (1990), which offers insights into African women's efforts to secure material well-being and economic independence in the extremely repressive context of colonial Kenya; and Mukurasi's Post Abolished (1991), in which a Tanzanian woman's autobiographical reflections encode penetrating criticism of discrimination in the workplace and different levels of public life. These texts reveal how life history can open up a rich synthesis of historical understanding not simply by writing into history those actors that have traditionally been left out, but also by redefining conventional understandings of what particular historical processes have entailed.

Apart from its novel inquiries of subject-matter, life histories of African women have often offered extremely innovative approaches to questions about voice and the politics of knowledge production. The scope for opening up insights into wide-ranging subject-matter is often offered by the use of different voices, multiple and intersecting discourses and an emphasis on polysemous meanings (rather than lateral narrative) that truly capture complex historical processes. This is interestingly illustrated in Miriam Matembe: Gender, Politics and Constitution Making in Uganda (2002), which includes the central first-person account of a prominent women politician in Uganda, and the interpretive discussion by key commentators in the Ugandan women's movement as well as a range of figures - from different sectors - with whom she has worked.

Life histories of African women have also opened up broader patterns surrounding the interpretation of African women's experiences. Many earlier case studies and life histories of African women define them as "a category of analysis" and the "subject(s) of power" (Mohanty, 1991). Trends in South African life history and biographical studies are especially revealing. A wealth of studies, including works by Hanlie Griesel (1987), Carol Hermer (1980) and Beata Lipman (1984) portrayed black South African women in terms of familiar stereotypes of victimisation and compound oppression. In these studies, the writer-researcher is defined as the possessor of knowledge and political insight, while the subjects of study appear to have neither political agency nor insight into their experiences. Research "subjects" are therefore subjected to the authoritative scrutiny of the researcher's analysis. As Mohanty observes, the figure of the third-world woman as a victimised subject of analysis plays an important role in creating "assumptions about Western women as secular, liberated, and having control over their own lives" (1991:74).

In recent years, the upsurge of sensitively-written life history and biographical reconstruction signals many researchers' efforts to capture not only the flux of women's actual lives, but also to incorporate their agency and unique views about their world. Thus, Belinda Bozzoli writes at the end of Women of Phokeng:

We are often told that the great men and great events theory of history is inadequate, but we are not often allowed to see what the alternatives are. Here the women give us their version of how things look from below, how history is constructed in their eyes (1991:242).

It is noteworthy, however, that the demands of sustaining a historical narrative ultimately inhibit the voices of the women Bozzoli interviews. A lengthy introduction is followed by decontextualised and often very brief comments by interviewed women, all of these being linked to the interpretive frame of the author. Her sovereign position in framing and interpreting their lives is spelt out when she writes: "Of course these testimonies need to be read with a critical eye and with enough knowledge of the context to make it possible to sift through the gold of true evidence from the bulk of ideology, poor memory, and willful misleading that occurs" (1991:7). Bozzoli's quandary in connecting the agency and voices of her research subjects with her own interpretation is compounded by her use of multi-biographies. While her study is therefore an insightful historical appraisal of the experiences of an especially marginalised community of poor South African women, ultimately, it does not convey their subjectivities or their own perceptions.

Similar difficulties arise in relation to Shula Marks' Not Either An Experimental Doll (1987), a study based on correspondence and the relationships reconstructed through this correspondence. The letters chronicle the mentoring by a prominent woman educationalist of a young black South African woman between 1949 and 1951. Divided into the editor's introduction, the correspondence, and an epilogue, the story spans several years, covering the young woman's first exposure to her mentor, the ensuing correspondence between the two and then the researcher's discovery of the black woman in old age in the 1980s.

The study provides a penetrating analysis of the pervasive ways in which race laws shaped educational prospects and options for young black women and the difficult situation of a philanthropic educationalist in South Africa's racist educational machinery. In so doing, it offers an example of the social history that fleshes out salient trends in white and black South African women's experiences during the mid-1900s. At the same time, Marks' appraisal of these structural relations makes her work unamenable to a holistic view of both of her subjects. It often establishes an interpretive frame that privileges her white woman subject's point of view and discursive location. The reader is often persuaded to take up a collaborative position both with the biographer, and with the biographer's "normative" subject. Consequently, the subtitle's promise of access to "the separate worlds of three South African women" and Marks' remark that "This was - and is - Lily's book" (1987:5), is not realised, despite the merits of the study as a scholarly contribution to personal relations shaped by gender and racial dynamics in mid-century South Africa.

New patterns in life history and biography emerge when researchers, irrespective of their origins or racial identity, acknowledge the agencies of research participants, foreground their own positionality and support this awareness with appropriate methodologies. Marjorie Mbilinyi's work with a Tanzanian woman peasant highlights this (See Mbilinyi and Rebeka Kalindile, 1989). In a discussion of epistemological and theoretical concerns for feminisms in Africa, she foregrounds her complex location as a white, middle-class Tanzanian who is also a "critical third world feminist". She goes on to describe the contours of a progressive feminist research methodology in the following way:

The positions of the researcher and the researched become a critical issue, along with the structure of the entire research process…The aim was democracy in the production of knowledge, and the empowerment of working women and men… Deliberate efforts have been made to counteract the alienating aspects of most social science research and to develop democratic relations and style of work between them and the other participants (1992:63).

A seminal study of personal life history research in relation to progressive methodology and feminist practice is Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (1989) produced by the Personal Narrative History Group. Dealing with a range of third-world contexts that include Tanzania and South Africa, essays provocatively show how knowledge production and class become implicated with feminist research on socially subordinate women.

This recognition is clearly revealed in Marcia Wright's Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life Stories from East/Central Africa (1993). Weaving methodological commentary and reflections on historiography into her text, Wright offers a complex social history, including life stories of five women and one man, of social transition, institutional change and human agency in East Central Africa at the tail end of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth. The structure of Wright's framing narrative as well as the order imposed on the oral testimonies she uses sustain her efforts to create a coherent historical account. At the same time, she evocatively conveys the subjectivities and voices of her participants because of her careful transcription of their stories. Moreover, by drawing attention to processes of reconstruction in her book she registers the intricacies of her methods as discursive acts, helping to create space for readers to position her voice and also "listen to" her participants' narratives.

Further complications around positionality and representation arise in considering African women scholars' use of life history. Karam's study of women in public life in Egypt, which draws on the life stories and political perceptions of various Egyptian women and men, is central here. Extending discussions of the politics of representation, she writes:

What is yet to be sufficiently researched… is the extent to which Western academia and including Western feminists within academia, influence research writing by native feminists on native feminisms… What unfolds in these situations is a power dynamic, wherein the traditional 'Other' of Western academia namely feminists, are dealing with this relatively newer 'Other', native feminists, who study their own societies (in which they are simultaneously 'Self' and 'Other') from within the halls of Western academia (1993:39-40).

The value of Karam's observations lies in her insight into the politics of academia, whereby all authority becomes inscribed in academic contexts and conventions. It is these contexts and conventions that colour the work of native feminists, whose research is necessarily also inflected by the differences in class and other locations from those about whom they write.

Despite many feminists' self-refexiveness about their research and their attention to life narratives as independent forms of knowledge, the impulse towards creating coherent narratives and interpretation, and the status of the life narrative as a distinct form of knowledge are always extremely difficult to reconcile. In appraising biographical productions as distinct discursive forms it is necessary to consider the methods, subjects and effect of another tradition on African women.

Herstories from Below

While alternative life history and biography are underpinned by new methodologies, other studies, many written and published on the continent, contest ingrained views about African women's passivity primarily through their subject-matter. Works like La Ray Denzer's Constance Agatha Cummings-John (1995), Margaret Ekpo: A Political Biography (1996) published and written by the organisation "Women in Nigeria", McCord's The Calling of Katie Makanya: A Memoir of South Africa (1995) and Folarin Coker's A Lady: A Biography of Lady Oyinkan Abayomi (1987) all stress the agencies of African women vis-à-vis colonialism, neo-colonialism and patriarchy. While these diverse and often short texts are not informed by a specifically feminist outlook, they offer sensitive testimonies of individual African women's subjectivities and experiences. A work which is similar in orientation but which has the advantage of incorporating a concise introductory analysis of patriarchy and feminist research methodology is Ngaiza and Koda's The Unsung Heroines: Women's Life Histories from Tanzania (1991). Contributors include both established and new writers dealing comprehensively with the experiences of women ranging from migrants and peasants to urban housewives.

Many factors have militated against the entry or acknowledgement of African women's voices into public arenas. These include the state's hegemony in gender initiatives, the legacy of colonialist misrepresentation or silencing of African women, and the methodical co-opting or depoliticising of women's movements by post-colonial governments. In this context, life history, biography and autobiography form unique genres of expression allowing African women to speak in their own name. In particular, they allow African women to intervene into masculinist narratives of nationalism and post-colonial reconstruction and domains of textual interpretation that often speak for and about them. Because life history, oral narratives, autobiography and biography favour the vocabulary and world outlook of a subject-author who writes/narrates/speaks, many African women have achieved visibility in public arenas of knowledge and information dissemination that are normally closed to them. This is provocatively revealed in Ifi Amadiume's Daughters of the Goddess, Daughters of Imperialism: African Women, Culture, Power and Democracy (2000), a study of Nigerian women in politics, where the author provides detailed transcripts of conversations and interviews with a range of Nigerian women and offers a compelling textual record of Nigerian women's intense involvement in public issues and civil debate.

A suggestive way of theorising this knowledge and its political effects is Nancy Fraser's formulation of "subaltern counterpublics" (1989). For Fraser, participation in the public sphere not only allows one to speak, but to speak in one's own voice:

[M]embers of subordinated social groups -- women, workers, peoples of color, and gays and lesbians -- have repeatedly found it advantageous to constitute alternative publics. I propose to call these subaltern counterpublics in order to signal that they are parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs (1989:81).

The structures and institutions of the African post-colonial state have severely restricted women's political expression. In this context, women's subaltern counterpublics can offer avenues for entry into the public sphere and provide a crucial forum for independent political expression. This is particularly important in the case of women denied access to educational resources and privilege, since both their own idiom and concerns are generally absent in the arenas of elite and male-controlled public debate. Heike Becker clearly attests to this in her study of Owambo women's oral and written literary tradition and shows how "women have positioned themselves in language vis-à-vis the silencing discourses of patriarchy and colonialism and …have reclaimed the position of speaking subject for themselves" (2002:291).

Understanding life history, biography and autobiography as expressions of subaltern counterpublics therefore allows us to acknowledge the crucial political role of these genres. They have offered certain women opportunities for visibility and vocality and created forums for tabling distinctly gendered views of African realities. Their publication has also meant that women's voices have been recorded and, irrespective of their reception, taken up into the masculinised public sphere. Finally, they indicate that women have extended the boundaries of public debates of national and continental concerns through interventions expressing their independent voices, identities and idioms. A consideration of key trends within two especially strong sites of biographical and autobiographical production, the biographical writing that has been flourishing in Nigeria from the middle of the century to the present day, and the autobiographical tradition that surfaced in Southern Africa, and particularly South Africa from the early eighties, foreground this significance.

The volume of biographies on women in Nigeria focuses in detail on the lives and personalities of individual women. While the documentation of women's experiences in pre-colonial Africa and under nationalism has vastly contributed to "herstory", this work tends to neglect the texture and complexity of individual lives. The corpus of biographical work on Nigerian women remedies this. Much of this work is marked by efforts to tell the stories of women in conventional leadership positions, and in so doing to create powerful role models and sources that are of crucial relevance to women's studies research in Africa. Thus, Effa-Attoe and Jaja's study of Margaret Ekpo (1993) traces the history of a Nigerian woman whose relatively privileged upbringing and class status as an adult were instrumental in her participation as a member of an elite that shaped nationalism in Nigeria. Folarin Coker's biography of Oyinkan Abayomi (1987) also tracks the life story of a middle-class woman, privileged by education and class, as she becomes involved in the intricate colonial administrative mechanisms that discriminated heavily against African women. Like the previous work, this study tends to be documentary, rarely grappling with the confluences of interior and public experiences, or with psycho-social intricacies that often make biography a unique testimony of individual responses. Similar studies in this tradition are Rima Shawulu's The Story of Gambo Sawaba (1990) and Ladi Adamu's Hafsatu Ahmadu Bello: The Unsung Heroine (1995).

In contrast to these works is the more probing and detailed attention to contextual background and socio-psychological concerns in For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria (1997). Written by two feminist historians, Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Nina Emma Mba this work is a compelling and detailed account of a woman activist whose political involvement spanned fighting for women's rights in Nigeria, involvement with the international women's movement and participation in Nigeria's anti-colonial struggle. What is similar about these works is their treatment of elite women who have attained notoriety or success within the pubic domain. While their life stories clearly expand the arena of national concern to incorporate the socialisation of young girls, women's situation in marriage and the difficulties of women's access to politics, their counterpublic interventions are shaped by locations of relative privilege.

A study preceding all this and yet offering an alternative approach is Mary Smith's Baba of Karo: A Woman of the Muslim Hausa, first published in 1954 by an anthropologist author whose residence in Nigeria led to her relationship with the Hausa woman. In Baba's first-person narrative, framed and transcribed by Smith, there is little of the conventional impression of heroism and leadership evident in the other biographical studies. Instead the reader is presented with a vivid story of a Muslim Hausa woman who negotiates complex and often contradictory relations based on gender, age and social position. Describing her birth at a time when the British colonised Nigeria, the narrative also charts key historical moments in Nigeria, such as the slave trading and internecine wars that were part of her everyday life. Most noteworthy about this biographical study, therefore, is the way it provides a public document of experiences that are usually eliminated or sidelined in the discursive terrain constituting the public sphere. Baba shows evidence of acute insight into the processes of which she is part, with her impressive memory, storytelling skills and positioned analysis of personal and historical experiences shaping a narrative that is both engaging and acute. This subaltern voice is therefore situated within a domain that conventionally speaks for or muffles her subjectivity.

Like the biographical works produced in Nigeria, many women's autobiographies from South Africa form subaltern counterpublics that, in the years before gender was properly integrated into democratic discussion, helped to alter national debates about freedom and struggle in a national context. A strong tradition of women's autobiography in South Africa has signalled, in ways similar to the corpus of biographical production in Nigeria, strategic ways for women to enter domains of public expression that are usually shut off for them, or that are open to them only when they speak in the name of those who have contributed to their oppression. Importantly, the first wave of autobiography by South African women occurred in the build-up to the first democratic election, and indicated many women's need to insert their narratives into the "national" narratives authored by South African men.

Significant autobiographies include Ellen Kuzwayo's Call Me Woman (1985), Sindiwe Magona's To My Children's Children (1990) and Forced to Grow (1992), Mamphele Ramphele's A Life (1995), Nongeteni Mfengu (1997), Mirriam Moleleki (1997) and Neliswa Mroxisa (1997). All tell personalised stories of women's involvement in community struggles, an involvement that is often marginalised in relation to the national landscape and male figures that are believed to define South African resistance to the apartheid state. Each writer is concerned with how, as a woman, she enters the spheres of work, domesticity and anti-apartheid politics, spheres which are consequently shown to be defined by rigid racial dynamics and gender hierarchies and stereotypes. Magona's work insists on the autobiographer's subject position as being simultaneously shaped by her being black, South African, poor and a woman. Highlighting her experiences of gendered socialisation as a child, as a working mother and as an underpaid domestic worker, she indirectly raises discussion of sexuality, reproduction and patriarchy. In the "progressive" context about which she writes, these subjects had not yet attained legitimacy or visibility. Magona therefore prefigures gender rights discourse within South African by writing an autobiography which introduces a woman's interpretation of her gendered experiences.

Ramphele's intervention as a South African woman is more direct than Magona's. She overtly engages with the male-centredness of the anti-apartheid movement to write a life story which questions both her own and broader patriarchal oppression ranging from verbal and physical abuse to the policing of women's mothering roles. While Magona and Ramphele inject different forms of gendered critique and analysis into their life stories, both widen the canvas of public debate on such issues as citizenship, struggle, freedom and human rights. Instrumental in the creation of vocal counterpublics, their autobiographies make gender politics a site for important discussion and concern within the public arena hitherto shaped by male-centred stories and agendas of anti-apartheid struggle.

Beyond South Africa, a similar insertion of autobiographical testimony that works to transform public human rights discourse is Post Abolished (1991) by Laeticia Mukurasi, a Tanzanian woman made redundant as a result of sexual harassment by a state-owned company. The narrative of her campaign for reinstatement engages trade unionism, the courts and legislation to explore in vividly concrete terms the terrain in which women have battled for economic and political rights. Not only her reinstatement, but also her present status as a spokesperson on labour and management concerns for Tanzania are measures of the power of her discursive intervention. Ellen Namhila documents a similar trajectory in The Price of Freedom (1996) and demonstrates how her involvement as a woman in the Namibian struggle for independence entailed her entry into and participation within public spaces in ways far more fraught than those experienced by African men.

The growing tradition of biography and autobiography in Africa has the potential to transform the face of feminist knowledge production about African women. The heightened visibility not only of the lives of African women, but also of their views about the world, their perceptions of change and their goals, create a public forum that shifts the framework of existing public knowledge. The insertion of subaltern voices vociferously challenges the circumscribed avenues for political expression in the post-colonial state.

In concluding this section, it should be noted that consideration of self-narrative would not be complete without referring to interviews. Traditionally, these have been forms of information-gathering within fieldwork in which African women have simply featured as research subjects. But interviews have the potential to foreground dialogical exchanges between the producers of research findings and the sources of these productions. They can also be documented conversations that convey intricate exchanges between speakers with different locations and different vantage points. Interesting examples of these sorts of exchanges are the conversations reproduced in Boyce Davies' Black Women's Diasporas (1995). These include Molara Ogundipe-Leslie in conversation with Paule Marshall, Flora Veit-Wild, a feminist literary critic, in conversation with the author, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Ifi Amadiume in conversation with the African-Caribbean feminist scientist, Nzinga. The dialogue form presents exciting opportunities for knowledge presented as located, unabashedly personal and interactive, rather than as authoritative, detached and inflexible.