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An examination of representations of human sexuality in Lola Shoneyin's first novel, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives, this essay focuses on the bold, sincere, and irreverent treatment of the twinned subject of adultery and illicit sexual love. It discusses Shoneyin's re-definition of love and paternity and compares the treatment of sexual love by first- and third-generation African women writers. Adultery is not only a devious device by Baba Segi's wives to find a solution to their husband's sterility but also a revolutionary transformation of gender relations in favour of women, long oppressed by patriarchy. The novel is a prime example of radical feminist writing in which traditional values that keep women in bondage are cast overboard and startling novelties are celebrated in the tridentate name of female emancipation, gender equality, and social justice. Symbolic of male supremacy in misogynous, phallocentric writing, the figure of the penis is deconstructed and its connotations of machismo and intellectual, moral, and physical superiority are negated. Through image-inversion, the pen is appropriated by the novelist and man is rendered powerless. Far from being a pornographic nostrum, the novel is a powerful mirror shocking readers out of complacency into acute recognition of the need to liberate women from the tyranny of polygyny; accordingly, it teems with the sins and language of patriarchy and subversive counter-discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black African women writers have been publishing for well over five decades. They have, through their works, attempted to lend agency to hitherto objectified female characters within male dominated literary discourse. In spite of this laudable contribution, their works have received little critical attention from both sides of gender. Likewise, Tsitsi Dangarembga has not received enough critical attention, despite her making a distinct and worthy contribution towards an unbiased depiction of the plight of women on the African literary scene. This paper traces how Dangarembga's novel Nervous Conditions takes such a cause further by essentially interrogating the concept of agency manifested in choice, together with its attendant social reconfigurations. The means by which Dangarembga's outstanding literary innovation is demonstrated is the investigation of the characters Lucia and Nyasha within the framework of the misrepresentation of Black African women in the fiction of Black Africans writing in English. It will be investigated how the choices of women characters affect the lives of other women characters in the novel in a manner that enriches the discourse of social change/transformation. Thus Lucia and Nyasha show that women can stand up for themselves and become liberated in a male dominated society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Although Zoë Wicomb's four works of fiction deploy realist techniques, they show a deep and increasingly self-conscious interest in using the strategies of textualism, in which the real is seen to be grounded in discourse, materiality is inscribed in allegorising ciphers or signs, and the presented world has the status of textuality rather than being representational. Her short stories and novels address, adjust and re-imagine history - not simply by interrogating the intersecting discourses by means of which certain historical concepts are conventionally managed and understood but also by undoing the apparent opposition between history and text. These strategies constitute what is, in effect, a struggle over the sign. In the process, Wicomb's fiction moves in what may be called a double aesthetic and political direction. Her fiction yearns for a writing released from 'history' and 'meaning' and yet directed to truth-telling about varieties of subordination; it also yearns for a world in which human subjects - and language - can shake somewhat free of history and be born renewed, so that history in another sense can come fully alive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a close reading of the sea - as trope, archive, and living presence - in Wicomb's oeuvre. Charting the undercurrents of meaning rippling across Wicomb's texts, it finds in the sea an emblem of Wicomb's aesthetic and ethical concerns. The sea is shown to house an archive that challenges nationalist histories and unsettles their temporal divisions, throwing textual meaning and identities into flux. It summons readers to recognise the uncanny return of repressed narratives and to embark on trans-oceanic readings of local and land-bound narratives and histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The home of Nigeria's renowned Marxist anthropologist, Ikenna Nzimiro, and of the country's ``first lady of letters,'' Flora Nwapa, is Oguta, a sprawling commercial centre situated on Oguta Lake near the confluence of the rivers Niger and Urashi. Both authors have described their home town in their own diverging perspectives. While Nzimiro's account focused on the town's political organization and questions of state formation and authority, Flora Nwapa was a novelist concerned primarily with women's issues. She engaged her home town's custom and religious beliefs centring on the pre-eminent lake goddess, Ogbuide, in her quest to champion womanhood. This paper examines how the novelist took certain artistic liberties and critically deconstructed local custom in her cause to promote women. While Nwapa's primary concern was women's reproductive rights and welfare, she also cherished Oguta culture, voiced her critique with caution, and was increasingly critical of foreign intrusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]