No Sweetness Here

National independence movements in Africa, like other liberationist movements around the world, have often had a fraught relationship to feminism. Male leaders within these movements sometimes characterize demands for gender equity as a new form of colonization—an “un-African” idea imposed on Africa by the West. In the 1960s, when Aidoo wrote this story, male-dominated African literary movements were determined to purge such “corrupt Western influences as feminism” (Allan, 209). Many female African writers today continue to resist calling themselves “feminists,” partly to avoid being silenced by these accusations and partly in recognition of Western, white-dominated feminism’s longstanding failure to account for intersectional forms of oppression. Alternative terms have emerged including womanism, motherism, and the broader term African feminism(s). African feminism “seeks to give the woman a sense of herself as a worthy, effectual, and contributing being while it rejects stereotypes of woman that deny her a positive identity” (Nkealah, Naomi N. “Conceptualizing Feminism(S) in Africa: The Challenges Facing African Women Writers and Critics.” English Academy Review, vol. 23, no. 1, July 2006, p. 135). That is, African feminism shares many of the goals of feminism more broadly, but it also seeks to respond to the specific challenges faced by African women.

Though Maami Ama does not explicitly think of herself as a feminist, her actions have distinctly feminist implications. Her refusal to remain in a marriage in which she is mistreated, despite the severe consequences of ending that marriage, is her way of standing up for herself as “a worthy, effectual, and contributing being.” She refuses to compromise this understanding of herself even as everyone around her denigrates her as a bad woman at best and a witch at worst. Though the assumption of Motherhood as Synonymous with Womanhood—the assumption that all women should be mothers—is a feature of the village’s patriarchal culture, Maami Ama’s devotion to motherhood is her own, and it does not compromise her feminism. In navigating multiple overlapping and sometimes conflicting identities—as an independent woman, as a mother, as a part of the Bamso community and as one who refuses to be subjugated to its most oppressive traditions—Maami Ama emerges as an emblem of African feminism: someone who is figuring out, in a moment of political and social change, what it will mean to be an African woman in the future.

Despite some prevailing antifeminist cultural attitudes in countries they inhabit, African feminists value their cultural traditions and do not want to see them overwritten with colonialist Western models. African feminism seeks to allow cultural traditions to continue in ways that do not disempower African women.