Abena P.A. Busia (Associate Editor)

Women Writing Africa: West Africa and the Sahel

The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2005

The Women Writing Africa Project, co-directed by Abena P. A. Busia, reveals that women were often absent from the official record in the history of West Africa and the Sahel, a vast expance of land lying between the Sahara Desert and the Gulf of Guinea. This volume—the second in a series intended to represent women’s oral and literary production through most of the African continent—provides a timely intervention that can be situated within the abundance of recent vibrant scholarship about the region, all of which constitutes the strong beginnings of a revised historiography of African women. The myriad voices in this volume establish a clear artistic perspective on the lives of women in the region and correlate with a subtext that both challenges former European assumptions about African women and adds information to newly reconstructed histories. The second volume of the Women Writing Africa Project opens the doors to new stories, participates in new thinking about African women in the current postcolonial moment, and fills in gaps in the epistemologies and histories on the continent as well as in the European discourses of Africa’s “invention.”