African Women writers share a long and traumatic history of colonialism, patriarchy and slavery. Despite the geographical diversity, the experience of colonial and racial subjugation unites them. African women writers' political
Buchi Emecheta's The Slave Girl: An Afrocentric Discourse
x I (192)
awareness enlarges their communal vision that, in effect, transcends gender issues. This paper contends that the political, geographical, and social factors problematize the status of African and all women of color, which thus calls for a different approach than that of Western feminism. In her influential essay ‘Under Western Eyes', Chandra Mohanty underlines the misconceptions prevalent in most Western feminist writing that “discursively colonize(s) the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the third world, thereby producing/representing a composite, singular “third world woman" – an image which appears arbitrarily constructed, but nevertheless carries with it the authorizing signature of Western humanist discourse" (53). Hence, the African female writer has a heavier burden to carry than the white, which explains the reluctance to embrace the label ‘feminist'. The colonization of Africa has certainly complicated the issue of gender relations, rendering the concept of Western feminism deficient in its tenets.