Women in African Studies Scholarly Publishing is a collection of five essays initially commissioned by the Bellagio Studies in Publishing Series but rejected upon completion of the manuscript. They discuss the challenges and difficulties that women scholars face in their effort to generate and disseminate scholarly knowledge. The second study, Women in Academia constitutes a set of eight essays compiled under the CODESRIA program on Academic Freedom to discuss the relations between men, women and academia. The last study, We Only Come Here to Struggle, departs substantially from the first two studies. It is used in this review to illustrate some of the arguments contained in the previous two books. We Only Come Here to Struggle is a narrative of the life of one woman who has lived through the harsh realities of life as a wife and trader in Kenya. From her village in Machakos District to Nairobi, Berida ekes out a living on the meager resources she earns from her petty trade. Her story as recorded by Claire Robertson demonstrates how one western author engages an African reality. In different ways, each of these studies tackles a theme that centers on women experience within or out of the academy and forms instructive material to read.
The five essays in Veney and Zeleza were designed to examine the experience of women in African Studies scholarly publishing in the North and South. The chapters range in interest from a critique of feminist knowledge in African studies to the cultural connections between Africa, through the Black Atlantic, to its Diaspora; from the politics of women scholarly publishing in Africa and the North to an analysis of the gate keeping functions of different outlets for African scholarly productions. All the chapters concur that the tag ‘women’ as it has been deployed by western feminism to imply universal unity and similarity of female experience is misleading. The authors insist that diversity must be accorded due attention. Basically, most of the authors in this volume would concur with Fouche that “what females in one society learn about how to think, act and live can differ enormously from what females in another society learn; in factÂ… there can be very significant differences within a given society.” They, therefore, focus on the experience of women as they are differentiated by location, religion, race and class. In the process, some of the authors rightly shed light on the stereotype of universal sisterhood. The chapters argue that though western feminism has achieved remarkable strides in dealing with patriarchy and sexism, it has failed to transcend its own internal forms of exclusion along racial and class lines. There should be no doubt about the relation between race and class because “whiteness is a location of structural advantage, of racial privilege.” As a result, differences along class and racial lines have been perpetuated and reinforced even when western feminists seek support for their political agenda on the basis of a unified gender category of biological females.
Nkiru Nzegwu’s chapter is most vociferous in challenging the notions of universal gender category of women who are subordinate, marginalized and disempowered by men. Unlike Sylvia Tamale and Joe Oloka-Onyango who emphasize “the general balance of traffic” of sexual harassment that favors men in the African academy, Nzegwu pays more attention to the nuances in this traffic as a way of challenging the universalizing creed of western feminism. Quoting Oyeronke Oyewumi’s study on the Invention of Women, Nzegwu argues that in both Igbo and Yoruba societies, women were not always biologically perceived. She identifies the situation of ‘female-husbands’ to demonstrate its importance in directly challenging the assumption in most western studies that define women biologically. She asserts that “no Igbo female is simply a wife.” The term ‘husband’, she adds, “is not equivalent to male, it is a relational term that mainly identifies members of the family into which a female is married.” She further convincingly argues that the perception of women in western discourse stems from an imperialistic projection and reading of non-western societies. For Nzegwu, women were not always powerless and subordinate in all African societies. A more accurate reading of their experience would show that “provisions were made for females to negotiate their way out of unfavorable situations.”
Take the example of motherhood. Most western feminism perceives mothering as complicit to patriarchal subjugation and therefore anti-feminist. Yet mothering means different things to different societies. Mothering is not always a domestic affair, as most western feminism would suppose. It certainly is not a confirmation of the givenness of patriarchy. In any case, the dichotomy between public and private, official and domestic spheres is false, at least going by the Igbo (African) scheme. Nzegwu argues that “a dichotomy that construes domestic and private as female sphere and the official and public as male spheres derives from the researcher’s own cultural scheme, not the Igbo conceptual scheme.” Using specific texts to illustrate her argument, Nzegwu is emphatic that such western imperialistic reading of African societies can and ought to be rectified. More studies of women in Africa should begin by presenting the positive contributions of women, rather than the present discourse that focus on “overly negative themes of poverty, prostitution, economic and cultural disadvantages, social domination, and political and social disempowerment.” She cites the damning discussion of Female Genital Mutilation as an example. Nzegwu correctly notes that “even if the thesis of subordination is true, we ought to realize that histories and social structures are different, and that women are not subjugated in the same way, thus no uniform models exists, and no set of prescriptions can be universalized.” In relation to Igbo society, she concludes that “there is no fixed permanent location of subordination.”
Nzegwu’s chapter clarifies some of the issues raised by Veney and Zeleza in chapter one. In particular, Veney and Zeleza identify some gate keeping functions in African Studies that have worked in favor of white men and isolated and excluded women in scholarly publishing. The exclusion is, however, not generalized for all women, rather it also follows ideological, racial and class lines. In cases where women have been included, these have most often been white women. The reasons for inclusion change on the basis of marriage and academic networks. Thus, married women or those with access to white men are most likely to be better published than unmarried ones. This trend masks the fact that given unrestricted access to research funding and publication channels, unmarried and non-western women are equally hardworking and prolific. The balance of access, they show, is in favor of white men and white women. One reason for the inequity is that networking has become a critical component for academic writing and publishing. Access to a network depends on access to senior scholars and members of their networks. Since such networking often goes along gender, racial, ideological and class lines, and male dominance is already an established reality, those who can easily be accepted within a network are favored. These are mainly white male writers and researchers.
Further, the authors discuss gate keeping functions like the peer review procedure. For them, peer review cannot be understood outside the politics of the academy and across geographical spaces. Peer review must be seen in the context of the ‘publish or perish’ syndrome that guides the determination of academic excellence, promotion and recognition within specific fields. Veney and Zeleza are cynical of this syndrome. They argue that “it has resulted in an inflation of publications, not in the expansion of knowledge, in which quantity matters more than quality, and mountains of papers are cannibalized from dissertations and research projects and churned out to be listed and indexed rather than read.” The result is an emphasis to publish without a concomitant emphasis on intellectual ethics and relevance. A critical analysis of most publications, they argue, shows the increasing distance between authorship and the very people being studied leading to what Oscar Wilde lamented as “an art for its own sake.” According to Veney and Zeleza, this growing irrelevance is partly because manuscripts are “written more with the reviewer than the reader in mind.”
Veney and Zeleza discuss the question of access, fairness and high academic standards in relation to peer review processes. For them, peer review is a process “often fraught with deceit, suspicion, and recrimination.” They correctly argue that peer review is at times neither blind nor conducted by peers. Often junior scholars are paired with senior scholars. Also, the editors are the final decision-makers in determining who reviews which manuscript. Some of the editors may even know the subjective preferences of the reviewers but proceed to use them. Together, all the above factors work to eliminate or reduce the level of women contribution to the understanding of themselves and their own societies. Using results from a survey they conducted, Veney and Zeleza demonstrate that women’s access to publishing infrastructure is limited and the constraints have been reinforced by a tendency to devalue women’s publishing and to deride gender as a valid area of research. Examples of male scholars who denigrate gender as a valid area of research are legion both in the North and the South. Fashina’s chapter in the Sall’s volume below documents one such instance of an established scholar at Obafemi Awolowo University advising a female colleague to proceed onto more serious themes of study since her promotion had been based solely on publication on women’s issues.
Veney and Zeleza correctly correlate male domination in the publishing industry with the low number of women scholarly production in African studies. By invoking the issue of originality, many publishers have ended up rejecting manuscripts submitted by women and those they ideologically disagree with. The authors add that the concept of originality is essentially empty of meaning. In many cases, they argue, rejection based on originality may be motivated by gender or ideological excuse, an excuse that largely depends on the predilections and biases of the reviewer, editor and publisher. For those male publishers who do not consider gender issues to be of any value, such ideological biases inform their idea of originality. This argument is useful to Rebecca Clarke’s analysis of women publishers in Africa and the North.
Clarke demonstrates that women publishers are few compared to male publishers. In Africa, she shows that women are under-represented in publishing. Part of this under-representation is connected to a colonial legacy and the dominance of large multinational publishing firms on the continent. Part of the problem also lies in the fact that editors of books, especially literary texts, are men who fail to appreciate the contributions of women in the literary world. Clarke documents the struggles of women in the publishing sector in Africa. She writes about Serah Mwangi’s Focus Publishers in Kenya, Mary Asirifi’s Allgoodbooks Ltd. in Ghana, and Jane Katjavii of New Namibia Books (NNB) in Namibia. Clarke extends her analysis of publishers to the North, especially the United Kingdom which offers some promising signs though the picture is not very different from Africa. This is especially depressing because publishing is better established in the North than in the South and the required technology and resources abound in the North than in the South. Even in the case of women publishing through North-South linked projects, women do not have prominent positions. Through an analysis Heinemann’s African Writers Series, and the co-operation between Heinemann and NNB, Clarke argues that women representation even at the level of editorship is minimal. She concludes that “the fact that all the editors of the African Writers Series have been men, as mentioned earlier, means that women’s voices and writings may not have received the prominence they deserve.”
Though tenable, the insinuation that women’s voices can only be represented by women editors is more complicated than Clarke is willing to explain. She takes this assumption to be true; a given that does not require explanation. Given that one of the editors of this book is male, one might wonder exactly what makes a gender-conscious male editor fail to represent female voices. Let us take the analogy of minority groups in the US to make this explanation. In the US, integration of minorities or the marginalized groups has taken place without confronting the basic structure of oppression and marginalization. Tessiu Liu insists that the diversity debates in the US, with their emphasis on multiculturalism, tried to integrate the racial minorities and empower women without necessarily eliminating the structure that promote marginalization. While some achievements have been attained as a result of the emphasis on diversity of cultures, multicultural curriculum only adds color to a white background without challenging this very background. Consequently, the idea that white is the norm from which others deviate remains intact or is further perpetuated.
Quoting her own class experiences in the US, Liu writes that even though students operating under a multicultural curriculum learn to sympathize with the poor, racial minorities and women, they still consider poverty, racism and sexism other people’s problems. “They condemn racism, which they believe is a problem out there between racists and the people they attack.” Analogously, she adds, “many male students accept the reality of sexism, feel bad about it for women, but think that they are not touched by it.” This suggests that there are gender-conscious men who are however detached from actual social struggles against sexism. Clarke should have investigated the possibility of gender conscious male editors who consider sexism a problem that is out there between sexists and women and who believe there is nothing they can do but merely sympathize. Such editors remain aloof and disconnected from the active promotion of women’s writings and from the wider social struggles for empowerment. Conversely, given that race is a gendered social category, examples of feminists who think that race is a problem between racists and the so-called women of color whom racists abuse adds to this argument. The examples are not hard to come by even within US feminism, for instance. Ruth Frankenberg writes of her own shock when so-called women of color accused white feminists for being racists. Feminism, she thought, was meant to empower all women by fighting their structural oppression by men. Like many of her socialist oriented white feminist friends, Frankenberg had never realized her position of structural advantage as a white woman. She writes:
As a white feminists, I knew that I had not previously known I was “being racist” and that I had never set out to “be racist”. I also knew that these desires and intentions had had little effect on outcomes. I, as a coauthor, in however modest a way, of feminist agendas and discourse, was at best failing to challenge racism and, at worst, aiding and abetting it.
For the study under review, Liu and Frankenberg’s explanations are helpful in several ways. First, they bridge a gap evident in some of the essays in this study. These authors explain and challenge a dubious correlation especially evident in Clarke’s chapter where male editors are equaled to male publication and female editors are equaled to female publication. Secondly, it draws attention to a failure in Clarke’s chapter to effectively problematize the positions of women in their respective societies to illustrate the variations in experience, thoughts and perceptions. Clarke is content to conclude that “the state of women’s scholarly publishing in African and Northern countries is firmly tied to the positions of women in their respective societies,” but she does not show what positions women have.
Further, it is worth noting that many of Clarke’s examples are drawn mainly from literary studies. A review of women scholarly publishing in the non-literary fields would have been helpful for the overall study so as to have a wider field of illustrations. This way, the discussion of literary and cultural production would have been reserved for Tuzyline Jita Allan’s chapter which discusses feminist scholarship in Africa. Allan’s chapter is valuable because it recognizes feminism for what is it, a political project. Allan talks about ‘feminisms’ in recognition of the varieties of feminism and the contests within them that have led some scholars and activists, especially among black women in the US and South Africa, to insist on its context-specific meanings. Allan demonstrates the significance of class and race in US and South African discussions of women issues. Quoting Cheryl De La Rey, she asserts that “racism is alive and continuing in many feminist groupings in South Africa.” Allan examines existing historiography to illustrate the unending tensions between the internationalism of western, and predominantly white, feminism on the one hand and womanism on the other hand. The former overlooks the differences and variations within feminism and among women all in the name of advancing feminist politics. The latter is as interested in black sexual power tussles as with the world power structure that subjugates blacks. Discussing the historiography on womanism, Allan shows that while feminism adopts an anti-male position, womanism is as much concerned about women as it is about men. Further, she shows that non-western feminists are also concerned about racism and power, power that has been deployed on a world scale with negative consequences of exploitation against the poor and minorities and with a double consequence for poor and minority women.
It has to be mentioned that black women in the US are products of a history of exploitation through slavery. Cheryl Johnson-Odim examines their experience by an analysis of how the literature on the Black Atlantic has grown to appreciate gendered dimensions of the Black Atlantic and the cultural connections with Africa. The Black Atlantic produced only a physical separation of the African race, but this has led to cultural breaks and innovations. The study of these innovations remains a vigorous field and Johnson-Odim tackles the cultural aspects of this historiography. Her intention is to identify and discuss changes and continuities, retention and syncretism. She insists that to be black and female “renders a certain common identity.” Of all the identities relevant to her analysis like race, gender, ethnicity, religion and class, only race and sex are less mutable. Women cannot do anything to change their gender just like blacks can do nothing to change their racial pigmentation. The commonality of this identity imposes certain specific concerns that a universal feminism fails to comprehend.
However, Johnson-Odim does not ignore the differences within. Rather she uses the racial commonalities only to demonstrate that the production of knowledge on African and black experience within and out of Africa, especially in the North, has to confront problems of communication across the Atlantic. Johnson-Odim is concerned about the way questions about women are posed, what the important pivots for posing gender questions are and generally, the need to be sensitive to differing perceptions. She is concerned that much of the scholarly productions on Africa are done in North America and Western Europe, mainly by westerners or Africans resident in the North. This has allowed research and writing to proceed with little reference to Africa, African women and African voices. By reference to personal experience, she suggests several possible ways of ensuring that the African voices on the continent are heard. Johnson-Odim rightly calls for better modes of networking with African scholars resident on the continent.
There is no doubt that this is a useful and informative collection of writings on women scholarly publishing in African studies. It does not take anything for granted neither does it shy from provoking our thinking in new directions. It confronts the academic and male mainstream and invites a new look at women and Africa and their relationship to the North. It is not a surprise that a mainstream book publishing series whose stated objectives focus on “book development and publishing in the Third World” rejected the manuscript for this study. The study is a living testimony of what publishing is all about; power, ideology and subjectivity. Should we not, therefore, applaud Africa World Press for rescuing this useful and informative manuscript?
Godwin Rapando Murunga, “African Women in th Academy and Beyond: Review Essay” Jenda: A Journal of Culture and Women Studies (2002)
