What is Women Writing Africa and how is it linked to political empowerment and social transformation?
Abena Busia: In Women Writing Africa we collect women’s cultural production– oral and written, formal and informal, sacred and profane. We try to collect whatever we can lay our hands on, as far back as we can get. We are looking at things that we know were written or spoken in female-centered spaces, about things that only women could say or in circumstances that women can control. What we are trying to do is get a sense of the way women have agency and control over their lives and negotiate their lives differently. We just so tired of our non-existence as women of power and agency in Western discourse where are viewed as perpetual victims-a barefoot pregnant woman holding a baby in our hands, or a barefoot pregnant women with a baby on our back and hoe in our hand. We are labeled endlessly. That sense of missing many things– such as no agency, no affective space, no human negotiation–all those things, which in fact, everybody knows are profoundly central to our existence and shape
