In Their Own Voices: African Women Writers Talk

by Adeola James

Interviews with a selection of African women writers.

This book makes a strong and compelling statement about the position of women writers and women in contemporary Africa using the words of the writers themselves', says Dennis Duerden, the author of the earlier African WritersTalking.

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Marina for posting about "In Their Own Voices". At first glance, this small book of interviews may seem rather intimidating as it isn't one of the more common formats. However, the insight I gained about women who are writing, publishing, and attempting to have books published in Africa was astounding. Fortunately, or unfortunately, if you are my banker, I have a whole new list of Authors and books added to my TBR. This was very interesting.

[Marina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even if some interviews were richer than other, they were all Worth the read. To think that this was done in the 80's and it still sound so relevant today!. I will highly recommend especially to anybody willing to learn more about the evolution of women writers in Africa. From the old days of colonization, to the aftermath of the so call independesnces and of course the role that these mothers have played to make the place of women in society more noticeable.
My words are surely not powerful enough tp pay tribute to this gem, so please do youself a favor and resd it.

[Sylvia Arthur · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stayed up until three in the morning completely engrossed in In Their Own Voices: African Women Writers Talk by Adeola James 🇳🇬. There’s so much to think about in this collection of interviews with 15 “first-generation” African women writers that my head’s still spinning and it will take me some time to process it all. Despite being published 30 years ago, and most of the interviews being conducted almost 35 years ago, in 1986, there’s so much in this slim but satisfying volume that’s relevant that the years fade away while the writers and their work remain in sharp focus.

Needless to say, the more things change, the more they stay the same, and many of the issues around the “triple burden” of being an African woman writer - lack of visibility due to lack of respect from gatekeepers and critics, cultural and social constraints and expectations - still persist.

The standout interviews were those with Ama Ata Aidoo 🇬🇭, Buchi Emecheta 🇳🇬, and the revelatory Molara Ogundipe-Leslie 🇳🇬, whose insight, authority and empathy completely blew me away. Her whole interview was a series of mic-drop moments that reveal her deep love for, and commitment to, the advancement of African people, and African women, in particular. When asked about her views on the link between scholarship and underdevelopment, she says:

“Scholarship is extremely crucial in an underdeveloped society, because we need information about yesterday and today in order to build a future. We have a continent full of illiterate and uninformed people to bring into the modern world. A woman who is serious and is involved must be a ‘scholar’ in its pristine sense of ‘one who studies’ not in the sense of degree holder.”

I’d have loved to have met her and to have studied at her feet. Sadly, Ogundipe-Leslie passed away in 2019 at the age of 78. I also learnt that both she and Abiola Irele, the pioneer literary critic, both did stints teaching at the University of Ghana. Oh, to have been a student in those classes!

Adeola James has crafted a wonderful work of recording and preservation. Such is her style that the book reads like a collective conversation between the writers as opposed to individual conversations with herself. Being a contemporary of her interviewees affords her an intimacy that may have eluded another editor, which is both a blessing and a curse. Reading the interviews, it sometimes feels like you're party to a conversation between friends about friends and you’re left out of the inside jokes, but perhaps that’s a small price to pay for such rich and rewarding discussions.

In the Introduction, James recounts her struggle to get the book published, from flat-out rejections to allegedly lost manuscripts, which mirrors the experiences of several of the writers she interviewed about their work not being taken seriously.

As Jean Christophe Cloutier says in Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature, “Given the lack of institutions dedicated to the black experience, the novel became an alternative site of historical preservation, a means to ensure both individual legacy and group survival.” The same, it seems, can be said of literature by African women writers in all its forms.

In Their Own Words… importance is not only as a historical document but as a guide to how to write yourself and your people into history despite a system, or systems, designed to deny your existence. Thanks to these writers, and to James herself, the individual legacy and the group survive, in real life but also on the page.

[ade · Rating 5 out of 5]

oh so excellent and heartening! such an important archive!