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Misanet.com / IPS, 6 February - African women authors share mixed feelings about their publishing success in the United States and abroad, but they do agree on one thing - women in Africa are in dire straits and, given their circumstances, the chance to tell their stories to the world is in jeopardy. "Nothing is going on with African women writers," said Sindiwe Magona. Sindiwe Magona is the author of 'Push-Push & Other Stories', which will be published in May by Beacon Press of Boston. The reasons are many and varied, but among the most important is literacy. - We have a generation of uneducated people in South Africa because our motto was 'freedom now, education later', says South African poet, Amelia Blossom Pegram, who now lives in Louisville, Kentucky in the midwestern United States. In other countries girls are not encouraged to go to school prolonging the state of illiteracy among African women and ensuring that they remain the poorest of the poor on the continent. Additionally, many of the communal, story-telling traditions, to which women have contributed, are dying out. For instance, in pre-colonial times, men and women told stories about their ancestors. These were stories to encourage moral principles, stories to scare and to entertain. Today, many women are entangled in the demands of family life and child raising, mixed blessings for the writer, the authors say. Others are caught up in the issues affecting their countries. "Writers are concentrating on the political problems of their countries, the social and health crises there. Who has the time to write in all of this?" she asks. Pegram added that some of her colleagues in Africa have formed writers' groups in order to stay creative. "(But) I haven't seen any new writers coming out of South Africa." But from elsewhere on the continent there is a trickle. Their writing, relentlessly personal and political, has only begun to seep into the literary consciousness during the last 25 years. They are writing from Africa as well as the United States. But publishing their stories continues to be a struggle no matter their address. "Those few African women that are writing today are not receiving the nurturing and attention necessary for emerging writers," says Magona. Magona left South Africa in 1981 because, as she puts it, she was "sick and tired of apartheid". She lives in New York City and has published five books, more than any other South African woman. It is a fact Magona wishes weren't true. - Some African women writers have done really well, like Ama Ata Aidoo for instance, said Kassahun Checole about the critically acclaimed Ghanaian author. Checole is the publisher of Africa World Press, located in New Jersey. "But there is no comparing the success of African women authors with that of Asian or Latin American women who are much more prominent with US publishers," he said. There are also no female equivalents of 1986 Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka, or Chinua Achebe, the celebrated author of the 1958 novel about European colonialism, 'Things Fall Apart'. African literature hit the Western world via Nigeria with works from writers such as Achebe and Soyinka. The authors were male. The African woman was absent, or disrespected, say many African women scholars here in the United States. Bessie Head, born in 1937 in South Africa, was the first African woman to emerge in the West as a novelist. In South African legal terms, Bessie was a "coloured" - the product of a white woman and a black man. She was born in an asylum because South African law considered her mother insane for sleeping with a black stable boy. Head died of hepatitis in 1985 at the age of 48. Then there was Flora Nwapa, a Nigerian, who self-published her first novel 'Efura' in 1966. She went on to five more collections of stories, making her one of post-colonial Africa's earliest prolific authors. She died in 1993 at the age of 62. What those pioneers faced and what is confronting African women writers of today is the problem of getting their work into the hands of readers. Being able to get published and reviewed by publications with a large circulation are matters of grave concern to African women writers. - It's hard to promote African women authors, Checole explained. "These women are first-rate talent, but the market does not recognise them." - It's an industry problem as much as anything, says Rashidah Ismaili Abubakar, author of 'Missing in Action & Presumed Dead', a collection of poems. One writer whose work managed to catch the eye of the prestigious Kirkus Reviews was Magona. But the publication panned 'Mother to Mother', her first novel, for its depiction of whites as the "scourge" of the earth and for its "uneven prose". Checole said that the literary hopes of emerging African women authors rest with small publishing houses like his own, for the time being. Yet these small firms do not have the clout with major newspapers and magazines that draw attention to new talent or even to older, experienced authors like Pegram who has been publishing her work since the 1960s. "We don't have a lot of capital to promote books," Checole said. Language is another problem. Stories in Xhosa, a South African language, or Igbo of Nigeria, are hard sells. And then we come back to the menace of illiteracy. African women aren't writing novels because they don't know how to write. But, said Micere Githae Mugo, that is not a significant barrier. "It's not a problem that they can't write," she said. "The main problem is that we don't offer ourselves as scribes to their stories." Mugo, of Kenya, is a playwright. She teaches literature at Syracuse University in New York. Mugo is currently translating an autobiography as told to her in Gikuyu, a Kenyan language, by a female Mau Mau warrior named Muthuni Wa Kirime. "She is an incredible woman who is a very eloquent speaker, but simply cannot write," Mugo said. "But her story will be told." By Kenneth Rapoza,
IPS
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