University of Venda Discourses on Difference and Oppression

Introduction

My analysis defines the shifting boundaries as the shifting marginal lines that characterise the identity ‘womanhood.’ It asserts that there are no established fundamental precepts in which women’s subjectivity can be expressed in its totality for there are historical, class, and patriarchal intersections in African women’s marginality. Women inhabit a netherworld lacking a centre and a logos. The nature of women’s subordination and oppression always assumes new subversive connotations. The trajectories of women’s otherness and difference are many and varied especially in view of the fact that the colonial era brought its own binaries of class and gender. The era described new additional lines of subjectivity for African women.

The analysis therefore examines the position of women in traditional societies and in the present postcolonial political culture where more margins of difference are subsumed under imperialism and classicism. The paper is a recognition that the cultural assertion of women is an integral part of that struggle of all the postcolonial people for socio-cultural re-definition. Women’s struggle for self-realisation is a parallel discourse to the African continent’s struggle for subjectivity in the face of neo-colonialist imperialism.

While women everywhere are social constructions woven around the biological differences between the sexes, women of the African continent are faced with a strongly marked patriarchal ideology. Patriarchy in Africa is engaged in a distinct form of representing society and social relations and it expresses partial truths in the service of men as the dominant members of the societies. Patriarchy influences the material conditions of most African societies and underscores difference in gender relations. It results in many controlling images of womanhood which redefine women’s lives, sexuality and desires.

It therefore still remains to be worked out what it entails to be ‘woman’ in the African context. The struggle African women face against marginality and difference is multifaceted and can only be addressed by a hegemonic discourse that challenges the matrices of difference in their totality.

The study looks at some African texts as they deal with issues pertaining to

(a)the gender differences of their societies and the myths woven around those differences to naturalise them.

(b)discourses that can be used to reclaim agency for women.

©women’s objective place in society and their subjective experience of it.

(d)women who respond to their marginality and offer different perspectives to the dominant ones on their lives.

Women and Tradition

As many of the texts under study show, the oppressive practices that women face are contained in traditional attitudes that have not been eroded by political and cultural upheavals in Africa. Tradition engendered the markedly strong masculinity neurosis which promotes stiff gender differences in the continent. Tradition is a symbolic order, in which repertoires of the discourse and practices of otherness and difference are stored. It is not only the repository of discourses but the genesis of many myths that distort women’s lives. Tradition is an ideology whose material systems of ordering the world systematically marginalised women resulting in the differences between men and women getting codified in social discourse. Social space was strictly divided into an inside and an outside as dramatised in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

Things Fall Apart examines the Umuofia society of Igboland; a society in which women do not only own nothing, but are regarded as part of the material acquisitions of men. The status symbols of the society are a large barn full of yams, wives, children and titles as illustrated in

Traditional Africa was built on manhood, a discursive space with many positive aspects but which many men reinterpreted to mean power to subjugate their women. Patriarchy, therefore, established a solidarity among men for dominating women. As a mode of production, patriarchy established women as part of the material wealth of men. In that way tradition sanctioned the economic dependence of women on men that is still apparent even today. In The Concubine, Ihuoma has to reduce her farming area because noone expects her to grow a lot of yams after her husband’s death. The yam is, in any case, a man’s crop. Women would be expected to own nothing because they were insubstantial themselves. As Ezeulu in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God points out "My wife’s cock belongs to me because the owner of a person is also the owner of whatever that person has."AOG 173

In spite of the hard work women put into working in the fields, the society had admonitory images about women which were the normative yardsticks for judging the worthiness of male members of the community. Women owned nothing and therefore any men who had no titles or yams was considered weak and labelled ‘woman.’ The traditional discourses that describe women’s location in economic, cultural and religious practices explain women’s oppression in the domestic sphere even today.

A reading of Ngugi wa Thiongo’s The River Between exposes the detrimental effects of traditional society’s spiritual practices on women. The novel explores the metaphysical relationship between the Gikuyu people and their land. This link is contained in their religious myths, according to which the land was given to them by Gikuyu and Mumbi, the god and goddess of the clan. The people of the ridges are spiritually linked to their environment represented by the river, the ridges, and the sacred grove; the visible and spiritual presences that give meaning to their daily lives. The river cures, the ridges are two seats of two opposing ways of life and the grove the mythical resting place for Gikuyu and Mumbi.

The physical and metaphysical relationship between the people of the ridges and their environment is emphasised in the circumcision of women. Faced with the colonial expropriation of their land and the Christian condemnation of their rituals, the people insist on circumcision, a ritual that is oppressive to women. The people’s zeal for the ritual is linked to

Traditional practices did not engender respect and affirmation of sexual and physical differences between men and women. The physical, biological weakness of women culturally circumscribed their existence at the margins of society. The novels Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, The River Between and The Concubine point at the roots of marginality in the traditional infrastructure of men and women. In The Concubine, Wigwe, Ekwueme’s father advises his son to view and treat his wife Ahurole like a child

Traditional morality and social cohesion is attributable to women. Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God dramatise situations in which there is so much cohesion that any deviant behaviour is regarded as an affront on the whole community and their spiritual being. When Enock, the overzealous Christian convert in Things Fall Apart, unmasks the traditional egwugwu, not only the people, but also the spirit world is shocked. That night,

In spite of their importance in keeping communities intact as mothers and wives, women were outsiders, inhabiting the periphery of the social spaces of traditional practices. In the adult world, men set the values, norms and rituals that women followed silently and unquestioningly.

The precepts set by men were regarded as absolutes and each community had guardians of these absolute values. In Sembene Ousmane’s White Genesis the Griote Gnana Guisse justifies the non-involvement of people in the incest case between the chief and his daughter. Echoing traditional male sentiments, she claims that any truth that divides and brings discord among members of the same family is false, a falsehood that weaves or unites people is truth. Gnana is urging women to rather keep quiet, than destroy families, and Ngone wa Thiandum, the mother of the disgraced girl is forced into this complacency. In any case as a woman she has never had to work out solutions to anything for herself and faced with her husband’s crime,

Traditionally, women were supposed to be unassertive and only to minister to their husbands’ needs. Women were also not expected to have independent thoughts and feelings of their own on anything. Akueke, Ezeulu’s daughter in Arrow of God, is continually beaten by her husband because she is headstrong. Her father Ezeulu has this to say about it

The marriages of older men to younger wives turned women into objects to be bartered for material and other gains, apart from promoting polygamy. One such marriage is what Xala, Sembene Ousmane’s third novel is concerned with. In the novel El Hadji, a politician and spiritual leader, decides to marry a third wife because both the traditional and the Moslem religious structures allow it. He also wants to display his wealth to his new in-laws as shown by the wedding gifts he buys for his new wife. Ngone, the young woman El Hadji marries, is victimised by El Hadji’s greed and the materialism of her relatives. Her aunt Yay Bineta, uses her as bait to El Hadji, so that she can raise her family fortunes. El Hadji wants Ngone for the rejuvenation a young woman would provide

The men who engage in polygamy always claim to be able to cater for the needs of all their wives but that is not often the case. Adja, El Hadji’s first wife knows that and by the time her husband’s third marriage takes place she has already turned indifferent and taken refuge in religion to escape the pain of a polygamous life. Tradition demands that she should tolerate the situation but not the frustrations. Tisa, in Lazarous Miti’s The Prodigal Husband is confronted with a similar situation to Adja’s. Her husband Musandivute wants a new wife because he has been promoted to foremanship on a farm and is earning a lot of money. Both novels illustrate that men equate wealth with the need to conquer more women, thus objectifying them.

Tisa also finds solace in religion but for both women religion proves to be patriarchal. The Moslem religion that Adja faces allows polygamy so it cannot protect her from that practice. The Christian religion that Tisa faces does not allow an irreconcilable separation from prodigal and philandering husbands like Musa. While Tisa successfully uses her Christian religion as defense against having to put up with a co-wife, the same religion prohibits her from leaving her husband’s traditional home or rejecting her husband when he comes back. However, unlike Tisa, El Hadji’s first two wives have to attend his wedding to his third because traditional and religious etiquette demand that they do so. At the wedding "they share a common sense of abandonment and loneliness" They know that El Hadji will not be able to cater for all their needs. This is the knowledge that Rama, El Hadji’s enlightened daughter tries to communicate to her father and the response she gets is a slap for being disrespectful.

In his review of Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood Femi Ojo Ade centres the issue of polygamy thus

While in the exegesis of both Islamic and African cultures wealth determines whether a man can have one or more wives, in both institutions there is emphasis on equality, fairness and justice for all wives and the fact that men should be there for their family(ies). This is not often the case, with the result that polygamy is being vulgarised and abherrated. The two novels Xala and The Prodigal Husband dramatise the vulgarisation of the practise. Adja and Tisa are victims of monogamised polygamy, where their husbands are de jure polygamists but de facto monogamists. The rights that the two women would have enjoyed in a traditional polygamous arrangement are violated.

Polygamy, like most traditional practices is subversive for several reasons, one of which is the non-observance of its tenets. While most traditional political and spiritual systems have been eroded, the practices that define women’s otherness and difference persist. Particular meanings, stereotypes and myths have changed, but the overall ideology of domination encoded in discourse endures as a remnant of tradition.

Motherhood and Nationhood

In social and literary discourse, women are deified and reified and given many mythical attributes. Society addresses mother earth, and women are the nation, and goddess. In many ways this mythologising of women removes them from the realm of reality into the rhetorical and obscures the reality of their subjectivity. Ihuoma is one such rhetorical woman in The Concubine. She is beautiful, with no moral blemish, and tragically loses a husband and an intended. Traditional divination reveals that she is a sea goddess who sought the company of humans and was incarnated. Her jealous husband, the Sea King, decided to indulge her wish to be human, but will not allow anyone to marry her. The sea king is so jealous that he turns himself into a spitting snake and renders Madume blind for harbouring a secret wish to make the widowed Ihuoma his lover. The impression created by the story is that a physically and morally impeccable woman does not exist. This same impression is manifest in all stories in which women are elevated to spiritual beings. The elevation only serves to stereotype women’s identity so that the reality of their social existence is mystified. The ambivalence created in submissive/powerful spirit as in Ihuoma’s life expresses the dichotomous relations on which the traditional cosmos is constructed.

If she is not a spirit, woman is associated with motherhood and many myths woven into that role. The mothering role is both elevated and denigrated. Socio-economic and cultural practices create the impression that womanhood is incomplete unless women are married and have children to bring up. Women also only have to bear male children to continue the family line. Female children manifest an incompletion for a mother as shown by the plight of Adaku in Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood. Adaku is so despised for having female children that at one point she is referred to as "the daughter of whoever you are" by her husband’s kinsman Nwakusor. Adaku finally decides to set her own conventions on the issue of her non-personhood and her female children. Nnu Ego, Adaku’s senior co-wife in the novel also dramatises the many sites for motherhood that are essentialised culturally. Nnu Ego fails to have children with her first husband, and her son with the second dies in infancy. Her ensuing suicide attempt points to the fact that in traditional discourse pregnancy and reproduction make a woman a woman and a man a man.

To the people who find Nnu Ego about to kill herself, it is at once sad and understandable that she wishes not to live. The son she bore and lost is more important than she is, and it is sad that Nnu Ego will not have children for her husband. For the onlookers, it is acceptable for Nnu Ego to commit suicide at the loss of a son.

The story of Nnu Ego is the story of all African mothers whose bodies are infused with maternal hysteria, who are made to believe that the loss of, or failure to achieve motherhood is equal to the loss of self, of gender. It is the story of women who are made to believe that they are women when they have children, and that failure to bear children should make them mad. Culturally, as Juliana Makuchi Nfah Abbenyi(1997:40) rightly points out, "maternal validation is important for women’s physical and psychical well being. "Nnu Ego even learns to accept her husband Nnaife whom she does not love initially because he made her pregnant; he made her a woman and that is all that is important. Her husband gave her a sense of fufilment by fathering her son, and when that son dies, that unmakes her socially and psychologically as a woman. Nnu Ego aptly dramatises the tragedy of women’s lives when they are circumscribed by motherhood alone, for she finally derives no joy from motherhood. Her sons leave her to go and fulfill their lives in other countries and she dies alone by the roadside.

The patriarchal emphasis on motherhood is what has led to radical feminists rejecting this biological imperative. In doing so, they not only identify motherhood as the site for women’s struggles, but also remove the human element from the process of pregnancy and childbirth. It is this human element that leads feminist Alicia Ostirker to ask rhetorically "Isn’t pregnancy profound? Isn’t childbirth universal?" Ostirker condemns the radical feminist stance of rejecting motherhood. About her own pregnancy she says

In the spiritual realm the mothering role is endowed with benevolence. Women are valorised spiritually and idealised in conceptions of nationhood. In Things Fall Apart, Agbala the supreme being has a priestess and the earth is governed by a female, Ani the goddess of abundance. There is also an accepted concept that mother is supreme. Women are portrayed as nurturing, protective and life giving. Okonkwo is exiled to his mother’s land when he inadvertently kills the son of a kinsman. Umuofia’s war charm is a one legged old woman, the agadi nwayi. Women’s wisdom is generally revered. The silly stories that women tell are regarded as moral lessons though most of the real manly members of the community hardly take any notice of them. Mothers’ wisdom and help in the community are, therefore, in an ambivalent state.

As Trinh T. Minh Ha points out

In the political arena, the woman is goddess and victim simultaneously. She is mother earth as well as the victim of the gendered codes that national liberation movements failed to address. As R. Radhakrishna would put it

Women and Sexuality

There are many practices, some of them conflicting, that define the sexuality of women such as marriages between women, circumcision, polygamy, forced and arranged marriages. The practices indicate that women are not biological unities and their sexual determination at birth is incomplete. Women’s bodies are thus re-defined and objectified by a society that does not regard them as sexual totalities with free sexual and sensual choices. Meanings are reinvested into women’s sexuality, the most absurd of which is that women are not women unless they are circumcised. Clitoridectomy, labial excision, and infibulation are practised to imbue women with more womanhood. In a phallocratic culture, the severing of the clitoris symbolises the exclusion of women from the privileges and power inscribed in the phallus. In such a culture, circumcision is the ultimate violation of the dignity, integrity of women’s sexuality and women’s rights to self determination and bodily inviolability.

Because of the active participation of women themselves in the practice, circumcision becomes a symbolic gesture of self denial and complicity in the sexual subordination of self. As Nawal Saadawi points out in her novel Woman at Point Zero, circumcision in most societies takes place early in the women’s lives indicating to them that they are a special sex, but one born to misery. Women in the novel are shown to have a resigned acceptance of the practice and will not question or challenge it. Women like the narrator’s mother in Woman at Point Zero are active participants in the suppression of their own sexuality because they help in the perpetuation of the practice. The mother looks on as other women cut her daughter up. Mothers’ participation in the ritual makes them willing transmitters of a social malaise.

The River Between dramatises the predicament of a girl struggling to make choices within the rigidity of a system which prescribes women’s sexuality to them. Muthoni feels incomplete and of no essence because she is not circumcised. She feels that she will not be a woman in the true traditional sense if she does not undergo the ritual. She therefore defies the authority of her father and the enlightened Christian doctrines on circumcision, and runs off to join her peers for the ritual. Her wound festers and on her deathbed she instructs Waiyaki the teacher, "Tell Nyambura I see Jesus, and I am a woman beautiful in the tribe." Before undergoing the ritual Muthoni had said that she wanted "to be a woman made beautiful in the tribe; a husband for my bed and children to play around the hearth." The implication is that circumcision ensures that women will be married properly because no man would want an uncircumcised woman. By further implication, marriage is the only goal for self-actualisation for women, and circumcision is one of the things to realise that goal.

In The River Between circumcision is also used as a political platform in the fight against colonialism and the erosion of cultural values. Circumcision is used as an affirmation of traditional rites, and the African self. When the Christians speak against circumcision, their actions are regarded as part of the colonial land expropriation, imposition of taxes, and forced labour. The people view the banning of circumcision by Christians as another indication of the suppression of their cultural practices. In a world where everything is falling apart, the men cling to female subordination as a pillar for support. The disempowerment of the tribe results in intensified pressure on women. Suddenly some oppressive ritual of the tribe is thrust into the cultural vanguard of the fight against colonial invasion. After the death of Muthoni, circumcision is insisted on with a renewed vigour in the ridges. That vigour is, ironically, an expression of the impotence of the whole tribe in the face of colonialism.

Whether the ritual is used politically or spiritually, circumcision remains an attempt to suppress women’s sensuality and a confirmation that only men have the right to sexual pleasure. The practice expresses an ambivalence at the heart of sexuality- man deriving pleasure from woman while striving to suppress the same in woman.

In traditional communities with their sanction of polygamy, circumcision manifested a fear of being unable to satisfy many uncircumcised women. The irony was that polygamy was meant to be a strong indication of a man’s virility; an indication of manliness in the ability to control women sexually and physically. In the present, the ritual has lost its meaning except to indicate that anatomy remains destiny for most women.

Men’s absolute power over women’s sexual and reproductive choices is manifest in their desire to control not only women’s bodies but their reproductive choices as well. Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross and Petals of Blood portray women in the unsavoury situation of falling pregnant and having to take responsibility for the children. Both Wanja and Wariinga, the heroines of the novels are lured by sweet promises and sugary words into the hands of deceitful men. Typically, the men impregnate them, leave them, and later make attempts to win them back into their decadent lives. The power of men over women’s bodies is refuted by Wariinga when she shoots her former lover, the rich old man dead, referring to him as a "jigger, a louse, a weevil, a flee, a bedbug, a parasite that lives on the trees of other people’s lives." Wariinga rejects the objectification of her body, and questions the othering that regards her as nothing more than a sex object. Wariinga regains confidence in her body and finds new ways and possibilities of enjoying her sexuality.

Women’s lives and bodies are controlled by men because of the economic dependence of women on men. In most instances women are reduced to sex toys by bosses who require access to their bodies as the only condition for them to get a job. Wariinga in Devil on the Cross aptly sums up the position of women looking for employment in the story she tells of Kareendi.

The gendered nature of society creates many spaces for men to ride over women’s feelings with blatant impunity. Women are objects of a deep neurosis in the African male that manifests itself in clinging to and manipulation of outmoded traditional practices. The practices express the male desire to control women’s sexuality. One of the practices that expresses male control as well as male sexual decadence is prostitution. Prostitution is the tragic assertion of the power of the phallus, in a total and non-committed control of women; defining the final rottenness of a phallocratic culture. Prostitution defines women as objects of men’s desire for dominance; a dominance they desire even over other men. It is a negation of true sexuality – an indication of a society that has lost all sense of feeling, of sensuality, and of beauty, and is satisfied only by relations of dominant and dominated even sexually. Such relations deny the erotic, the true fusion of sensuousness and feeling. They also reduce all relations to cash exchange.

Prostitution is an abherration of human relations, the last level in the cash nexus of capitalist human interaction. Wanja, the brothel owner of Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Petals of Blood, helps put prostitution in its social, economic and historical perspective. In her whorehouse she exploits and forces other women to exploit their bodies. She engages in the overt commodification of human bodies that defines capitalist economic and social relations. Under capitalism, the most personal of relationships are converted into mere economic transactions. As Gayatri Spivak points out,

Prostitution in Africa also exemplifies the negative connotations attached to the expression of manliness – the expression of male sexual virility. Virility is demonstrated in the acquisition of new wives, concubines and mistresses. When Ousmane Sembene employs the xala to mark El Hadji’s fall from political economic and sexual grace, he is expressing the discursive spaces of the phallus in the African cosmos. The novel Xala examines the effects of the destruction of the phallus as both sexual and political power. The meaning generated by the xala, or loss of virility, which strikes El Hadji, is that the African bourgeoisie are not men. They have lost their manly dignity by selling themselves to international capitalism. The xala is the crowning symbol for the effiminisation of the community that has been created by colonialism and global capitalism. It is the ultimate symbol of moral, social and financial impotence in the international sense, but also the inability of the African bourgeoisie to embrace phallocracy in a positive way. The xala is the failure of African manhood that is so exalted in traditional cultures. The African bourgeois cannot be productive because they have no sexual, political and economic authenticity like traditional men. They have lost their Africanity and gender identity as defined culturally.

The phallus traditionally defined strength, achievement through hard work and endurance. However, what the phallus defined was not always good for other members of society, especially women. In many instances it was a discourse of domination that survived by subjugating women. To be a man meant dominating others, be it women or any other weak member of society. The phallus accumulated multi-spaces for its self expression, all of which othered women. African society’s worship of the phallus was sometimes marked by tragedy.

In Things Fall Apart Okonkwo’s authority and strength of will are invested in the phallus. A male warrior, he thinks he has become a shivering old woman because of his reaction towards Ikemefuna, his adopted son’s death and his participation in it. He also cannot understand how a strong man like Ogbuefi Ndulue could be close to his wife. His obsession with manhood leads him to kill the court messenger who is a woman in the traditional sense but is a powerful extension of the white man’s rule that has displaced Okonkwo’s exemplary manhood. When Okonkwo realises that noone is to condone his actions or stand by him he commits suicide rather than be effiminated by the new forces. Okonkwo’s tragedy indicates the fragility of the socio-culturally defined manhood.

Okonkwo’s end is his inability to come to terms with his reduced manhood as well as embrace aspects of femininity. The traditional, manly, community that he represents does not define any interpersonal or intersocial relations between men and women, or real men and the efulufu represented by the court messenger. Gender roles are learnt early in life. When Nwoye, Okonkwo’s son is about twelve, he has to learn to limit his interaction with women and young children. In the evenings he sits in his father’s Obi, the men’s hut, listening to Okonwo’s stories of violence and bloodshed though he much prefers his mother’s stories about tortoise and hare. Manhood, while linked to the biological anatomical maleness, is an artificial state that boys must aspire towards and attain. In the attempt to win maleness, many men and boys are robbed of their identity. Nwoye is forced to be a man; to be assertive to his mother and sisters. The Umuofia society does not accommodate androginy; that is why Okonkwo later disowns Nwoye for joining the Christians who have mostly attracted less successful men or efulefu from the community. He also rejects his father Unoka’s image in its totality because he was effiminate and had died without titles, or any ‘manly’ achievements.

Women and History

The African post-colonial world is both racialised and gendered. It is a world in which women’s otherness is an exclusion that is exacerbated by historical events and women suffer the double bind of gender, class as well as ethnic marginality. Coloniality affects women’s roles as a subordinate group within culturally defined gender roles. Capitalism in its patriarchy makes women lose their autonomy and subjective existence.

Lawino in Okot P’Bitek’s Song of Lawino dramatises the predicament of women forced to inhabit that cultural netherworld circumscribed by colonial patriarchy. She is scorned and spurned by her husband for being traditional because he has embraced those new values that require him to denounce his African roots and origins. She now inhabits a world where she has to define a centre for herself and the whole song-poem explores her attempts to do that. She expresses what should be her people’s attitude towards the Western culture. Her expression is free of the knowledge of Western values that would hamper her attitude to them. Lawino is violently opposed to Western culture because it describes a new subjective space for her.

In one important way, Song of Lawino is assertive, and an assault against the entire fabric of subjectivity and othering. Acoli ways are presented without apology and shown to be superior to Western ways. Lawino takes pride in every aspect of her culture. She attacks Western culture for its immorality as well as hypocrisy. In the Western dance

Conclusion

The gender issue is a theoretical issue engaging the contestatory or superstructural ideology that would end the oppression of women. It has many spaces for engagement, though the spaces have not been explicated fully. The cultural spaces that might empower women are yet to be worked out in gender theories that are specifically African. The African situation is unique in that the oppression of women is a cultural, religious and moral binary exacerbated by colonial and capitalist exploitation. The latter two created their own binaries of class and gender. As some sections of this analysis show, women are women in discourse and there are many discourses on women that make their marginality putative. There are many guises of women’s oppression and theoretical stances need to be worked out for women to break out of those discourses that victimise them.

Primary Texts

The research is premised on a number of conjectures, the first of which is that there are many sites for exclusion and otherness that define the essence of women. It also argues that the oppression of women is a moral, cultural and religious binary exacerbated by colonial and capitalist exploitation. Colonialism and its disruption of traditions eroded the cultural spaces that might empower and legitimate women as a transformational force.The research examines the effects of colonial ideology on the constructive terms for womanhood in Africa presently.

The analysis also argues that the image of the other and the search for alternative identities for women in the African context is marked by doubling. The African woman is constructed in many roles, images, models and labels, in response to specific social imperatives. Womanhood is not an essential quality, but one that is constantly made and redistributed. The analysis examines these many images of difference that are essentialised in the world of women. It attempts to construct womanhood in the African context, to examine its social correlates, its ideological potentials and its freedoms.

The African woman, as most artistic works will indicate, constructs multiple identities and subjectivities for herself. Many writers are grappling with the extent and effect of the discourse of resistance that women can appropriate for themselves. The Marxists argue that women can appropriate the discourse of otherness to evolve a contestatory discourse of emancipation. They can do this in spite of the many problems manifest in the fluctuating subjective space that they occupy in the African world. The research will argue that the Marxist imperatives might be readapted to evolve a third world feminist epistemology.