Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies (2001) ISSN: 1530-5686 WEST AFRICAN WOMEN IN EXILE: CITY, UNIVERSITY AND DISLOCATED VILLAGE

Rashidah Ismaili AbuBakr

This paper has evolved from conversations with sisters from “Home.” We mourn our “Exile.” With enthusiasm of a born-again [Christian], we return “Home” with our degrees, earnest and eager to “work.” Then we come face to face with socio-political constraints of our nations. Run squarely afoul of Senior Lecturers who remained in the trenches while we were abroad, frolicking in the lands of plenty. Our personal expectations, our family pressures, societal restrictions on women are some of our greatest enemies. Things we took for granted before are now luxuries. Assigned readings being fulfilled are dependent not only on financial resources of students but the availability of books in the libraries and the country. Simple needs, xeroxing machines and paper, faxes, and now complex telecommunication systems and computers, are seen as extravagant and often are prohibitive. Intellectual famine confronts us with all its grisly remnants; empty library shelves, university censorship and hoarding. Books on the illegal market at twice the price offer little salvation. Defeated or overwhelmed by it all, we send out triplicate resumes and write all former professors to come to our aid in getting us the heck out of our “Homes” as soon as possible. We come back to former host countries, to universities where we are able to earn a decent wage and maintain a tolerable standard of living.

Exile is not always the romantic notion of heroic revolutionaries. It is a place of uncertainty, pain, frustration and anger. The struggle to maintain one’s sobriety and to support the family is waged in tears with one self and the kindred at “Home.” It is real and deeply felt when one reads of massive five-year projects to introduce village women to water purification and social development. Hard to bear are those embedded memories of things we saw as children. Our experiences and rites of passage, stories we heard, all are negated by those amongst whom we have learned and possibly been influenced.

We glorify the women in our personal lives, caretakers, and teachers. They take on almost supernatural powers, Memory can augment because the space-time leaves between then and now create gaps that our needs fill. My sisters and I recall every female incident confirmed by novels and poems which choreographs the dances of our adult movements on the floors of the academy, on streets of strange lands. We are divided selves, strangers seeking the comfort of disquieted places. Putting our wide African feet in glass shoes to appear before princes who have not sent invitations to their feasts.

Demons of self-reproach torment us. In the meantime, letters begging money for school fees, bull sperm, a package of snowballs for show and tell our young nephew needs as proof - we are in “Exile.” So we work from one pay cheque to the next. One pay for us and the other to be shared among the many we left, back there—“Home.”

It is getting late. We must prepare a lecture for a graduate seminar on “Sisterhood Within Polygamous Compounds.” In our central heated homes, we choose each reference to silence the anticipated negative response our students have formulated. We call each other with our concepts of female language and how it operates in Aminata Sow Fall’s novels. We stray from the immediacy of the subject as we reminisce. How clearly we see Sall Niang in her chair, beautiful and big. We laugh knowingly or, as we have learned, as is said in the parlance of psychological terminology. We connect with her as she uses a winnowing basket to count her money. The flow of conversation is not hindered. Schooled fingers are computerized eyes that separate coins according to value. We can see the wide spread of her lap forming a printed cloth carpet for her computations. This woman is familiar to us because she is in fact, an aunt, mother, neighbor who never seemed to understand she wasn’t our mother when it came to scolding.

We want to focus on her and how she looks tomorrow because two of our graduates are borderline anorexics. Full bodies are beautiful. And the clock ticks away so we hurry on to share a last moment of the latest statistical data on the spread of AIDS amongst heterosexual women in the village. We wonder how could it be. These women are clean and uncontaminated by the city. They live outside the sinful influences of bars and clubs. Part of us feels betrayed by the imposition of the serpentine encroachment of modernity. The Plague has come to our own mothers. We ring off condemning men who don’t know how to control themselves. Who leave Eden and come back with the disease of urban life and shame. The money they went to seek, if any remains must now be spent on costly, questionable and sometimes non-existent medicine.

In the silence of my study I re-read “The Beggars Strike” in order to defend against misogyny and at the same time point out the bonds between Mour and Lolli. She is “the depository of old Mour’s secrets.” (1) Lolli is a product of centuries of codified behaviour taught by all the women of her family, the dead and the living. Most of all, I want to explicate the ritual of “spoiling” the new wife. Normally a senior wife makes all the arrangements for additions to the home. A house for the new wife is made next to hers. There is hierarchy and social order. I am aware of anti-African prejudices of three of my students. Their latest critique of a romanticized mother figure juxtapose to promiscuous men was thinly veiled in Conradian linguistics.

Can I embellish Aminata Sow Fall and her use of “Barakats” and beggars with personal vignettes? One proposed term paper under the pile of articles cut out from magazines and new papers is titled, “Comparative: the Notion of Begging and the Work Ethic As Seen in the African and African American novels.” Have you ever!

I turn to “Whispers from a Continent,” by Dr. Wilfred Cartey. Although he is looking at mostly male texts, in the first section he places African women geographically in the village. She is inextricably linked as metaphor of stability. The quote he uses is from Camara Laye’s The Dark Child:

“The nourishing milk comes not only from the natural mother but also from the earth of Africa; mother and earth cross-fertilize and link together to form a single symbol.” (2)

My mind wanders to stories told me in the quarters of women in my home.

“In the old days when a couple were married, they spent their first night under the heavens. They lay on freshly tilled soil. A white cloth was placed under the young woman. The man entered her and placed his seed in her and the fields.”

Indistinguishable insemination!

Mother/Africa as a fixed image of nurturing and purity, a refuge for the clan, is one the wanderer establishes out of need for order and a haven some place. Africa as a negative metaphor comes out of the Greco-Roman origin of the word, chaos, meaning darkness and lack of order. In my haste to defend, I plug my ears against nagging voices that call me to return home. Am I deconstructing metaphors? Have I committed canonical suicide by suggesting there is sense and structure in the formulation of roles, divisions of labour and criteria of beauty and achievement pre-Europa?

Ah well, on to “Alienation As Seen in the Novels of West African Writers.” I ignore those female voices that shriek in my right ear, “A woman’s place is in her home.” I try to locate the conflict between ‘pagan’ and ‘converted’ (Christianity and Islam), village and city. I focus on their placement in the ‘cannon.’ Oh my God (or is it Goddess?) here too we are exiled from the TEXT.

Women and village as purity is a gendered fabrication that is sexist and reactive. It denies the self-identified construction and social purpose of cities before 500 BC, (I must be careful when teaching the sociology of Africa not to make Freudian slips and say Before Christ lest it be taken to mean Before College.) It is the ‘other’ construction of ‘woman as being’ that banishes West African women off stage. They are not main characters of their own drama. Thus, they miss the curtain calls, moments in literary history when political events create moments of ‘political’ independence. But what happened before the before of BC? Where are the women’s songs that rocked us to sleep?

Oral texts are categorized as folkloric and appear under ‘anthropological inclusion.’ Dichotomized, the basis for imaginative works remain alive as referenced remembrances. These remembered stories do not find their ways along paths of dissertations because most await translations of the explicator. So, we say to each other. “How do we retrieve and include,” insert and place those TEXTS into the discourse? The language into which we translate them becomes the house under which we search the libraries of universities that help continue the displacement of this literature. Ah sistahs, wey ting we go do- o?

In the meantime, a junior sister has written a third request (underscored third) for a Madonna tape. She says she is sorry she cannot find the old lady who used to do àdìre, and aso òkè is too-too dear. She can’t mek it. But since me be heah-o, send de ting soon-soon. How do I to cull from the labyrinth of roads where our voices are beamed on loud speakers, the latest efforts of modem technology aids and abets evening hours of story telling? Nah wondah! We say our stories into recording machines, prompted by an interpreter to another person who makes squiggles on a thing ‘they’ call a page. Thus I/Africa/Woman becomes a thing explained second-mouth, to a world pre-disposed to the truth of mine/our existence.

Yet still I wonder what are the literary histories upon which an Ama Ata Aidoo’s imagination is built. Her cultural heritage. Is it from Yaa Asantewa? Or the voices of her ‘abusua’ (3) urging her on and to question the words of males. After all, as my own grandmother used to remind me. “They are of men and woman born.”

The force of words in one of her poem/missiles takes deadly aim at both current difficulties facing younger faculty and surely other women, is echoed in “A Salute to African Universities.” (4) (How familiar.) This is the last poem of a trilogy called “Three Poems for ATTA.” Implied in this piece is the despair and dismay of mimicking a senior lecturer who quotes every Ghost of Britannia. He would faint at the notion of including many of modem day icons into the syllabi of English literature. One who retards the development of young minds, blocking the flow of information and at the same time, becomes himself custodian of information that is no longer relevant.

Painfully smarting from the reminiscences of postdoctoral returns, we ‘sisters’ share our stories fed by Sister Aidoo’s fingers. Times when T... had to write five hundred times. “I must not laugh at Chaucer. He is the father of Shakespeare.” S.....’s Head who actually had a moment of silence before and after readings of ‘the sonnets’ by W.S. or Billy Shake his spear. I remember a caning for having dared write a short story at the age of eight. Really, who ever heard of such a thing. A child! A mere girl and a “native” to crown it all! Why not me, the child of three queen mothers before me? I had been recipient of mighty stories and songs where all the main characters looked and spoke like me. Now I read Ama Ata Aidoo’s poetry and short stories and hear her Akan ancestors speaking in Asante, Twi, Ewe, Ga, Fanti. And it does not matter that our mother tongues differ. We need no informant or translator to expedite communications. Our abusua are joined by mogya (mother line of descent).

I see her today as I saw her over twenty years ago. She was already a writer of note, and was here on a research fellowship. I was in graduate school hanging on by weekly pinching from wages to pay my tuition. I was walking down the Avenue of the Americas and W 4th Street. Just about to turn down Cornelia St. to walk two more blocks to my four-flight walk-up flat. Out of the African Cosmos, a voice came. “O-wee sister.” I was relieved of my anger over an undeserved grade by this intrusion. There was a full-bodied woman with a huge head-tie and a buba over a pair of Blue Jeans! Well, her face was so full of smiles, I almost cried. We embraced. I was asked about myself. I told her where I was from and why I was in New York. She told me who she was and why she was here.

Today I see her, my sister, wiser and just as strong. Ready smiles for those she blesses and unashamed stares for those she questions or disagrees with. The strength of her poetry, short stories and plays are often excluded from “the texts” are intimate hands touching the quick of my cultural memory.

The opening of “Message” is written around the time I had just met her and recalls for me as I write this paper, her voice, her face, as I see her characters:

Look here my sister, it should not be said but they say they opened her up. They opened her up. Yes, opened her up. And the baby removed? Yes, baby removed. I say..... They do not say, my sister (5).

Ah, language! It is the control of message, the word that we embrace. In the usage of European languages some African writers successfully sabotage and defuse the sting and often intention of meanings. It is the will of the African persona (ah, ah, there goes Europe traipsing through my head again!) that forces language through its sieve to shape new meanings, its sound and purpose upon language to become writer.

Women as “being” is the force which collects and shapes sound, become word to her children. She exists in confines of “traditional” homes, under the stars or in mansions. But wherever she is there too is the word-former. So to return to the idea of Africa/Woman equal mother, one asks how did this connection come to be? From my readings it seems that this is partly a male conceived notion. This is neither good nor bad. I am merely suggesting it is utilitarian. That is, Africa as geographical space begins to open up to an outside force; Europe and male, the grip on ‘Her’ by African men is loosened.

This was unnerving because in the African worldview, there is an inextricable relation to the earth, one’s own land. Out of this bond which connected the living and the ancestors, grew the need for rootedness. Therefore, the creation of myth and literary image of Africa, meaning one’s physical attachment to earth, formulates the woman’s place in the home. From here one male and female are born and sustained. Problems arise as internal contradictions of group expansions, wars, climatic changes and finally, the invasion from without. Cities in pre-Europe were agrarian centers where work took place or, where religious shrines were held. Village in this context was ’home’ where one slept, ate, and lived.

Under the growing influence of inter-group contacts within Africa herself and subsequent cultural and political exchanges-land and the use of land was redefined. Non-Africans controlled division of labor and the ‘Mother’ was ‘gotten’ by a new man. Gradually European definition of Africa becomes the same for Women.

I am suggesting that the view of “home” and “village” as described by male writers, since they dominate the canons, reflect their need for stability and definition. However, the political realities of centuries of slavery, cultural domination through religion and education further dislocate the ‘village.’ City becomes metropoles where Oyibos Toubabs, Obronis inhabit. They are Sabon Garis. It is in the strangeness of created spaces that Africans observe and record their drama. Women become reflections of other created images in mirrors developed and held by someone else.

Ground can no longer lay fallow for five to ten years because across great oceans in now born great halls, long range planning cannot tolerate native customs. In fiction we re-create lovingly those days of back breaking work to locate our African selves. We deny the sweat and pain of labor. Our words are separated by non-African thoughts and experiences through which new fiction are written.

And we, my sisters and myself, in the intimacy of discussions behind closed doors, remember how awful it was to wake up and wash in cold water. We get psychosomatic headaches recalling the feel of buckets of water on our heads, firewood piercing the round cloth we put to balance our loads. Now we look at post cards of ‘native’ women walking gracefully home, baby on their backs and heavily laden heads, and bare-breasted.

We remember choking on smoke. Scarred legs now cosmetically remedied bear witness to the role of young girls as fire makers. In my house it was the senior woman who had firepower. Now it is Consolidated Edison who holds the key to my fires, attached by monthly remittance.

And as I was saying or was not saying, how is it that women define them? In Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter, a woman’s voice and language. Her letter is a co-authored autobiography shared between two life-long friends. Ramatoulaye questions her traditional views and developing the model that Trinh T. Minh-ha used, she becomes “holder of speech” (7). As Ramatoulaye “creates” their story, she becomes reenactment and prophetic voice of the future. She is objective in her analysis of her own behaviour and that of her daughters and their friends. While her life has safety of ritual. Ramatoulaye accepts temporary unhappiness as a betrayed good woman.

Aminata Sow Fall balances tradition through voice and character as manifestations of women’s behaviour. Her character, Lolli, is a product of all the women of her family and the women in their lives. Aminata Sow Fall connects her women in sisterhood, the dead, living and unborn. These women when portrayed as sufferers are usually house bound. Their “rival” co-wives, are younger educated pretty and frequently referred to as modern. These women do not attach themselves to the households. They exist within the family as an ‘outsider’ who lived separate and apart, and extension of male dreams. One wonders how they see themselves within family structure and if there is a sense of female connectedness. These women are seen as conniving creatures that shun “tradition,” smoke, wear Western clothes and look men in the eyes. Men, husbands become enamoured of them to the extent that they deprive their first families. The men are depicted as old fools lusting after young flesh. Heh, my sistahs!

We, my sisters, and me have all cried on each other’s shoulders recalling some personal tragedies borne by women of incredible fortitude. This is an encouraged behaviour in which the good woman always wins the love and respect of a repentant husband syndrome. It is proved when he returns dog-hang-tail after money finish. But the City traps so many men and women in its spider web.

Much of the images of the cities in Africa are frightful. Names have to do with activities associated with slavery, (domestic and foreign) European presence, (oppression, racism). Evil dens of iniquity where fallen women and virtuous ones led astray by depraved and debauched men wait as earthly hell. Where identity of the city, that is the historical purpose of the city was religious, known for its high creative and intellectual level, the quality of one’s life is enhanced by going there or being in close proximity.

West Africa boasts some of the oldest and most noble cities in the history of human kind. The spiritual city of Ife in present day Western Nigeria was founded on Yoruba religious principles. Few stories appear to dispute this. On the other hand, it has been the source of many a novel, poem or proverb. Most “respectable” young women are warned not to trust nor associate with Lagos men. Dey dem bad-o. Its development is more a consequence of trade and has a colonial legacy. Kumasi and Benin, Abomey, Bornu, Segu were cities that were multipurpose; spiritual, cultural, political and commercial exchanges. Some cities became notorious for slaves such as Ouidah in Dahomey and Zinder in Niger.

As my sisters and me talk about the night watcher, women who never seemed to sleep, guardians of the roads where pots sit precariously on stone blocks. These women set up shop selling bean cakes, boiled peanuts wrapped in leaves or newspapers to taxi drivers, and city people with no access to cooking facilities.

Are they not good women? Where are their homes? These women who sit alone and sometimes in-groups of other women they refer to as sisters or mothers and to whom they tell their stories. Often times some lost girl child stops by and they ask why a young thing like her is out in a wicked city like this, alone and, so late. Their ears receive the stories and their mouths: “Ow,” and “Eh, na so!” And for these few moments, a relationship is established and the exile is reunited in traditional bonds. The village comes to the city. She, the lost and painted face one, tells how life and love, bad-bad, has wrecked her life. The newly formed women’s council advises her. Some one may offer fare back home, another, a potion to take care of her rival. Still one more woman will tell her what to do to make her man love her forever. “He will never look at another woman. She may even be invited to become a “daughter” in the family of the night watchers. Such is the wealth of material available to the listener/writer. The village has been emptied of able-bodied men. They desert village/home and therefore, their women; mothers, wives and children for the city. Village has become almost synonymous to uncultured, primitive and poor, all things one wishes to escape. Here too remains the person one no longer needs nor desires.

But the stationary has moved; mountains have crumbled. Stones have walked. If man has gone off in search of fortune, a dream, the woman who has been left behind is tired and sometimes bitter. The girls who left for city have also searched for place and dream. The tension created by intrusion and conversion, compounded by absence over work, have all helped to create a conundrum into which both males and females try to locate their selves. The seductive powers of tranquility are juxtaposed excitement/s in:

The Tropicana to her was a daily drug, a potent, habit forming brew... She (Jagua Nana). She knew that, seen under the dim lights of her favourite night spot, the Tropicana--and from a distance--her face looked beautiful.(8)

Return then for Jagua Nana becomes a safe haven because of politics and city life. So Jagua goes home with her brother because:

This was in Lagos, nowhere else. Not that she preferred the quiet life, but she gradually ceased to picture the riotous life. It had become an echo too distant to touch her. (9)

Eh, my sisters! We cheeps, life nah rough up country. We have read about a “revolutionary” agrarian breakthrough. African women trained in modern technology. Then we see Emitai. (10) It jars our memory. We see those women with loads of rice on their heads. We hear the songs they sing as they single-file along secret roads, feet solid on the ground. There is power and purpose in their actions. They have power of life and starvation, tradition (salvation) in their female hands. They are village and strength, triumph of the oppressed over oppression. Their gender is less important as the victory of black over white. It may complicate matters. Once “home” in her place, she, African woman/savior, reverses to the dutiful control of hierarchical males in her life. Thus the village is re-started in its relocation because Woman has returned as nurturer and stationary.

As cities become increasingly traps for cheap African male laborers it is at the same time a haven for the developing elite. Both these classes are seen as by-products of “white man de do.”

In Joys of Motherhood, Nnu Ego comes to the city of Lagos to join a husband she did not want in the first place. He is a house servant to a low level civil servant family. We read that he has lived in Lagos for five years. Nnu Ego is not able to produce a child, has lived in the village all her life. She goes to Nnaife in the city, the man to whom she has been married. Her family says of her: “Let her go...she is as barren as a dessert” (11).

The passage from village to city is arduous and long. Nnu Ego is “up-country” and the city has “a queer-looking house.” Her husband is busy washing (women’s work, indicating displacement of his maleness) his employers’ clothes. Along with an initial dislike for Nnaife’s size and his looks, seeing him thus does not increase her affection.

The village becomes a place of infertility for Nnu Ego, while the city is where she becomes fertile and politicized.

On her way back to their room it occurred to Nnu Ego that she was a prisoner, imprisoned by her love for her children, imprisoned in her role as the senior wife. She was not even expected to demand more money for her family that was considered below the standard expected of a woman in her position. It was not fair, she felt, the way men cleverly used a woman’s sense of responsibility to actually enslave her.

At home in Ibuza, she would have had her own hut and would at least have been treated as befitting her position, but here in Lagos, where she was faced with the harsh reality of making ends meet on a pittance, was it right for her husband to refer to responsibility. It seemed that all she had inherited from her agrarian background was the responsibility and none of her booty. (12)

If there are contrapuntal movements to the city and events in her life, the proximity to their oppressors provides easy access for “soljahs.” Men disappear from “city” to “armee.” Children escape to “Emerika” and London where daughters marry across clan lines because: “this is Lagos, not your town or your village” (13).

Nnu Ego’s husband is reminded. Finally, the city is a place where African men are not finite authorities. Police, even in black, have powers delegated them by white males, so that the city for men becomes a clash of same-gender configuration.

So Nnu Ego goes back home, to safety. She has been dislocated. Once “home” she sinks into despair and wanders without time related events to daily activities. She is barren in her village, fecund in the city; reverse cycle, a dislocated city/village.

Just as Samba Diallo returns home and all the “returnees” we read of in the texts, the question that arises is, home to what? The city has become village as the “Presence” has relocated to roadside kiosks, London, “Emerika” “Pahree.” She reconstructs village where she goes because she functions as voice-ears and metaphor. When the “Presence” is unable to find her way, the seat of council is lost.

The village is no longer certitude or a refuge because calamities that are resultant of de-population and male flight, has caused hardships too great to bear. Entire farms are now dependent on female labor. Agriculture is in disarray because division of labor is de-gendered. Taboos are broken.

The community is reduced to stark survival. Women find it more difficult to migrate than men unless they are married. Marriage does not however determine the possibility of travel. Frequently pressure to remain abroad is enhanced by employment. For the present time, there are several layers of working societies for African women. There is the cottage industry. One woman provides childcare for other Africans or Americans. House cleaning and waiting tables in African restaurants are job possibilities.

Women who work in restaurants are usually from the country of origin as the owners. Then there are the hair braiders. Often these are very sharp market women who have owned their own businesses in Africa. The shops are purchased by cooperatives from their countries and owned by male dominated collectives. The women work in large social units and can sometimes be seen on street comers near subway entrances soliciting women to have their hair braided.

The next levels are market women who vend in marts. They rent stalls bringing their stock through a vast network of resources from home. Occasionally there are street vendors. These women tend to have limited English skills and are frequently the wives of men who formerly were on the streets selling but who may now be taxi drivers.

The highest level is reserved for those who are well educated and are able to enter professional world with relative ease. These women are in various institutions of higher education. A few medical doctors, lawyers are employed in hospitals and law firms or non-government organizations. It is ironic that the wide disparity between these women due to class and education evaporates at some point, since all are vulnerable to a volatile immigration system, gender/race bias, and the problematics of dislocation. Thus exile becomes a conundrum in which women exist waiting. Waiting.

References

Aidoo, Ama Ata . Someone Talking To Sometime (Harare, Zimbabwe: College Press, 1985 ), 25.

Aidoo, Ama Ata. “Message,” In African Writing Today, ed. B. Mphahlele (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967 ), 87.

Bâ, Mariama. So Long a Letter (Oxford: Heinemann, rpt. 1989).

Cartey, Wilfred. Whispers from a Continent: the Literature of Contemporary Black Africa, (New York: Vintage 1969), 3.

Ekwensi, Cyprian. Jagua Nana (London: Panther Books, 1961).

Emecheta, Buchi. Joys of Motherhood (London: Heinemann, 1979)

Fall, Aminata Sow. The Beggars’ Strike (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1981), 56

Laye, Camara. The Dark Child (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994 1954).

Minh Ha, Trinh. Woman Native Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 6.

Sembene, Ousmane. Emitai (New York: New Yorker Films, 1971).

Copyright 2001 Africa Resource Center, Inc.

Citation Format

AbuBakr, Rashidah Ismaili (2001). WEST AFRICAN WOMEN IN EXILE: CITY, UNIVERSITY AND DISLOCATED VILLAGE. Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: 1, 1.