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Out of Silence: Writing Interactive Women's Life Histories in Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Leslie H. Townsend
Leslie H. Townsend*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Extract

It is not surprising that no distinct line demarks Mrs. Zenani's creative stories and the events of her own life. The plotting of fictional imagery sometimes gives way to the detailed depiction of, for example, a rite of passage distilled from her history. If the oral tale provides insights into history, such real life descriptions as are found in this autobiography are frequently framed by the imaginative tradition.

During the summer of 1982 I lived in the predominantly Muslim city of Kano, in northern Nigeria, to study the Hausa language and to learn about women's lives—their activities, interests, and identities. Residence in Kano challenged the questions and theoretical assumptions of my research. The ‘silences’ I encountered in the field now inform questions for a methodology for the study of women's lives that acknowledges the connections between researcher, subject/s of life history research, and the eventual written analysis of their narrative histories. An underlying theme—and persistent question—is the extent to which such writing tells us more about the researcher or the narratives' subject/s.

Feminist theory and methodology inform this consideration of women's life histories. Feminist scholars have focused on the inscription of meaning in women's interests in writing about women. They have assigned a central role to “women's conscious perceptions” of their lived social experience in theory construction. The specific inclusion of women's, and other groups' perceptions contributes to historians' formulation of research models and methodology. I will discuss several methodological issues before returning to the ‘silences’ of my own fieldwork.

Type
Silences in Fieldwork
Information
History in Africa , Volume 17 , January 1990 , pp. 351 - 358
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1990

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References

Notes

1. Scheub, Harold, “And So I Grew Up: The Autobiography of Nongenile Masithathu Zenani” in Life Histories of African Women, ed. Romero, Patricia J. (London, 1988), 7–46.Google Scholar

2. Geiger, Susan N. G., “Women's Life Histories,” Signs, 11(1986):334–51Google Scholar, combines terminological and process definitions for producing life histories.

3. Personal Narratives Group, ed., Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington, 1989), 35.Google Scholar

4. Ibid., 4.

5. Geiger, , “Women's Life Histories,” 336Google Scholar, cites L. L. Langness to provide a useful definition for life history drawn from oral data: “an extensive record of a person's life told to and recorded by another, who then edits and writes the life as though it were autobiography;” cited from Langness, L L., The Life History in Anthropological Science (New York, 1965), 4–5.Google Scholar

6. See, for example, Marjorie Mbilinyi, “I'd Have Been a Man:’ Politics and the Labor Process in Producing Personal Narratives,” 204-27, and Marjorie Shostak, “‘What the Wind Won't Take Away’: The Genesis of Nisa—The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman,” 228-40, in Interpreting Women's Lives; and Mirza, Sarah and Strobel, Margaret, eds. and trans., Three Swahili Women: Life Histories from Mombasa, Kenya (Bloomington, 1989).Google Scholar

7. Illustrated in Romero, Life Histories.

8. Smith, Mary, Baba of Karo: A Woman of the Muslim Hausa (New Haven, 1954), 10.Google Scholar

9. Geiger, , “Women's Life Histories,” 341–42Google Scholar, points out numerous discrepancies in the two accounts, raising concerns about an “androcentric ethnography that fails to encompass, and therefore cannot accommodate, women's lives.”

10. Callaway, Barbara J., Muslim Hausa Women in Nigeria: Tradition and Change (Syracuse, 1987), 35.Google Scholar

11. Smith, , Baba of Karo, 10.Google Scholar

12. Callaway, , Muslim Hausa Women, xi.Google Scholar

13. Personal Narratives Group, “Origins,” in Interpreting Women's Lives, 8.Google Scholar

14. Ibid., 10.

15. Smith, Baba of Karo, is a significant exception.

16. Hausa is used here as a linguistic reference to a conjoining of various ethnic groups that have adopted the Hausa language in northern Nigeria.

17. Callaway, , Muslim Hausa Women, 19Google Scholar, notes that kulle has increased in recent decades in the Kano area, even in rural communities.

18. Although not a stated programmatic issue, class/status delineated the access of our very public group to a highly educated/elite sector of the population.

19. See Henley, Nancy M., Body Politics: Power, Sex, and Nonverbal Communication (Englewood Cliffs, 1977), 1–26, esp. 2, 25Google Scholar, for a discussion of the extensive interplay of power and gender, race/ethnicity, and patterns of communication.

20. Gordon, Ann D., Buhle, Mari Jo, and Dye, Nancy Schrom, Women in American Society (Somerville, n.d.), 8.Google Scholar

21. Callaway, , Muslim Hausa Women, 60.Google Scholar

22. Ibid., 60, links claims that women in farming areas “prefer” kulle as a relief from hard menial labor so they may engage in trading activities to women's illiteracy; outsiders have determined this preference in the absence of women's own writing about it.

23. Smith, M. G. in Smith, Mary, Baba of Karo, 11.Google Scholar

24. Mascia-Lees, Frances, Sharpe, Patricia, and Cohen, Colleen Ballerino, “The Postmodernist Turn in Anthropology: Cautions from a Feminist Perspective,” Signs, 15(1989): 7–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, discuss the dual roles of feminist scholars (ethnographers) who are simultaneously constituded as “outsiders” and “speakers of the dominant discourse.”

25. Mirza, /Strobel, , Three Swahili Women, 6Google Scholar and Mbilinyi, “I'd Have Been a Man,” 209, set a standard for collaboration. They review their texts with research subjects and they produce bilingual editions in English and the subject's language.

26. See Henige, David, Oral Historiography (New York, 1982), 119–27.Google Scholar

27. I am grateful to Elizabeth Enslin and Deborah Rubin for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.