Now reflecting on my blogs, I
see that the majority of the blogs I have written as part of this series have
ultimately perpetuated many of the stereotypes Wainaina warned me against in
his piece ‘How to Write About Africa’ (Wainaina 2019). This series of blogs have drawn
attention to the struggles women face in collecting water, participating in
local and global water governance and the threats they are exposed to by
climate change. The inspiration and data used in my blogs was not however drawn
from thin air, I relied on peer-reviewed academic literature, policy documents
and journalistic accounts to inform my blog posts. However, I often struggled
to locate optimistic accounts in these sources. For me, this demonstrates how
pervasive tropes about African poverty are and the level of change that would
be required to dismantle them. When discussing this in a seminar, the seminar
lead, reflected on his childhood experience of waste disposal in Nigeria. His
experience included memories of extremely strict refuse collection policies. He
went on to outline his surprise at the descriptions and use of statistics which
describe Africa as lacking in basic service provision, including refuse
collection. Ultimately, he made the case that literature which negatively
describes the state of Africa were useful to international institutions as they
facilitate and legitimise donor intervention. Leading on from this then, we
might argue that writing about Africa in the ways that Wainaina described might
be understood as a key component of neo-colonialism as it can act to legitimise
‘benevolent’ interventions and ‘philanthropic colonialism’ by charities such as
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Intergovernmental Organisations such
as the World Bank (Wainaina 2019; Ukelina 2022: 100).
Figure 2: The front cover of ‘His Only Wife’ by Peace Adzo Medie
(Source: Waterstones
2022)
Over the Christmas Break I read
‘His Only Wife’ by Peace Adzo Medie, a Liberian-born, Ghanian writer (Medie 2020). The fictional story follows Afi, a
young Ghanian woman as she tries to navigate an arranged marriage. Whilst the
some elements of the story, such as the feature of an arranged marriage,
corroborate familiar negative accounts of the experience of women in Africa but
other elements of the story act to display the empowerment of African women.
‘Aunty’ is a key character in the story and can be described as a matriarch,
one character described how ‘she behaves like she is God’ (Medie 2020: 167). In order to settle marital
problems, Afi must stand up to Aunty, the woman of the family. (spoiler alert!)
At the end of the story, Afi eventually leaves the arranged marriage and
becomes a successful business woman by herself. Whilst this example is
fictional, stories such as this one, written by women who have first-hand experience
of life in Ghana can help to develop a more positive image of what life is like
for African women.
This story, alongside the lived
experience described by a seminar lead ultimately present a different image of
Africa to the one that is so often featured in the peer-reviewed literature I
consulted. Ultimately, this clearly demonstrates the need to listen to and
empower African voices to write about and define their own continent. This is
the key message I will take away from writing this series of blogs.
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