Education for women has not been a priority in Africa, so women have lacked literacy and left little or nothing behind for future generations to discover. Historians have had to rely primarily on oral sources or written records left by missionaries, colonial officials, or African men, who variously viewed African women as mothers, wives, daughters, lovers, prostitutes, threats, subordinates, challenges, or a harvest ripe for Christianity (or the means through which Christianity might spread through Africa). All of these sources, however, see the woman from outside, rather than from within. African women are, to use the academic jargon of the day, "the other."
Feminist Press met this problem head on, with the release of the first in a series of four collections of women's writing from Africa. Seven women spent five years collecting court records, praise songs, manifestos, essays, letters, stories, and diaries to produce Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region. Over a third of the sources are oral, but are now accessible to those who can't necessarily travel to Africa to hear stories and poems for themselves or search through archives to find what African women have to say about the historical time period in which they lived. The book is one of a kind, women presenting Africa, primarily African women presenting Africa.
All of the pieces included in the book are introduced with historical context.
Thus, for example, before we read an excerpt from Susiwe Bengu, we learn that she ran away from her home because her father had agreed that she would become the youngest wife of a much older man. She fled to a seminary. As the text points out, the school may be a "haven" for girls like Susiwe Bengu, but "its very existence is also part of the causes of these long-term transformations" which led to much social upheaval (134). Historically, the arrival of missionaries and western culture disrupted African marital patterns, including polygyny. Women who wished to escape their cultural heritage found refuge with missionaries. Bengu herself is cryptic about why she refused to be married. The closest she comes is declaring: "My father kept pressing me to go till at last I went to that man's kraal, but I did not stay in his hut. There were many people there" (135).
We are given the earliest glimpse of a white woman's perception of a black woman in Durban, South Africa, through the eyes of Eliza Feilden, who wrote a memoir about her time in South Africa as the wife of Leyland Feilden, the youngest son of an aristocrat in England. She describes "Louisa," her servant: "She is a nice creature, but willful, and the difficulty of teaching her to understand in English first what she is to do, then how she is to do it, and lastly, seeing that she does it, is very fatiguing. She comes to me, 'What me do now?' Her mind is active, and her body strong. If we can only have patience with her she may turn out a fine creature and learn to be very useful, but you cannot reason with one of another language, who has no ideas upon daily duties" (129). When Louisa decides to get married, Mrs. Feilden laments the loss with no intended irony: "...and so she set off, crying when I told her she ought not to leave me unprovided with another, it was ungrateful after all I had taught her. She shrugged her shoulders and was very sorry, but selfishness prevailed, and she set off there and then" (131).
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