Pauline Ada Uwakweh has gathered an impressive array of literary essays on the themes of gender, war and peace. The collection is divided into two thematic sections. The first five chapters of the book address the inclusion of women and girls in the war writing of women essayists from across Africa. The second section analyses memoir as a genre of war writing to deliver hope and healing in the traumatic aftermath of war. The purpose of the book is to render visible, and thus make knowable, the creative and artistic expressions of war, to act as the medium by which the gendered atrocities of war are exposed (p. 3).
In her introduction, Uwakweh is fully mindful of the conceptual risks of pairing war and violence with ‘Africa’. Far from reinforcing the stereotype of Africa as a continent where atrocity and conflict run amok, each chapter carefully frames conflict as a product of politics and circumstance rather than something that is uniquely ‘African’. The result is a collection of essays that theorizes the human suffering caused by war as a human phenomenon, not as something that is unique to ‘Africa’. Instead, the authors address, to varying degrees, structural issues of slavery, colonial dominion, the developmental problems of postcolonial states, and the role of war and armed conflict in solving political problems.
Uwakweh's collection introduces non-African literary critics, policymakers and human rights advocates to the lingering human costs of European colonial rule. This is the beauty of the collection, for its themes on the power of storytelling and the responsibility to gender-sensitive and gender-specific narratives will resonate in feminist classrooms at the graduate and undergraduate level. Faculty can productively pair Uwakweh's edited volume with Amina Mama's 2000 article ‘Why we must write: personal reflections on linking the alchemy of science with the relevance of activism’ (Agenda, vol. 46). Mama uses personal narrative to explain why feminist African voices are rarely heard, and, when they are, why they are usually published in the wrong place, inaccessible to African audiences. The pairing would be powerful in the classroom, certain to spur discussion, as Mama and Uwakweh both present writing as a form of gendered agency.
African Women Under Fire is thus a literary call to arms, for African scholars to tell African stories, as Ada Uzoamaka Azodo states in her foreword (pp. ix–xi). In this way, the collection offers readers a culturally rooted analysis of the gendered effects of war in Africa, to illustrate how war is more than armed violence to gain or keep control of the state. Through rhetorical and discursive turns, readers learn that war is the embodiment of human suffering, and that this suffering is gendered (and classed and raced). The trauma of war – both individual and collective, and historical and contemporary – can be addressed through literature. Literature is the medium through which the gendered costs of war are worked out while also providing a sense of hope in the future, as war traumas can be retold through narratives of resilience and resistance. This overarching framework makes the collection a useful resource for students and scholars in multiple disciplines, including African studies, feminist security studies, peace and conflict studies, and women's and gender studies.
In presenting a collection of essays, written mostly by Africa-based or Africa-born academics, for non-African audiences, Uwakweh is ever mindful of the power of the pen. In compiling the essays, Uwakweh seems equally concerned with issues of whose voice and which individual and collective identities matter. The first section includes analysis of women's agency in the Biafran conflict (Jessie Sagawa, Chapter 1), gendered anti-colonial resistance to Chimurenga in colonial Rhodesia (Tendai Mangena, Chapter 2), how war changed women's roles in the private and public spheres in postcolonial Angola (P. Julie Papaioannou, Chapter 4), and women's self-reliance and resilience in the face of physical and structural violence in postcolonial francophone Cameroon (Paul N. Touré, Chapter 5). The second section addresses the gendered aftermaths of war, in narrating the trauma of girl soldiers in northern Uganda (Uwakweh, Chapter 6), and the struggles of Hutu women to be recognized as survivors after the Rwandan genocide (Emilie Diouf, Chapter 7).
Three chapters are not country-specific. Instead, they seek to theorize gendered forms of human suffering through a denial of personhood, statehood, or both. Nanjala Nyabola (Chapter 9) unpacks the need for women and men to perform vulnerability in seeking legal refugee protection. Moussa Issifou (Chapter 8) reminds readers of the importance of ethically and sensitively mediating the contested terrain between victims’ narrative of violence and the testimonies of perpetrators of that same violence. Melissa R. Root (Chapter 3) theorizes the discursive effects of how political elites frame women as victims as well as the ways in which national violence is grafted onto, and often memorialized through, the female body. Taken together, these three chapters remind readers that the dictates of war and statehood are inscribed on the human body, a long-standing concern of feminist scholars who rarely consider the way in which war is written onto African bodies, let alone African women's bodies. African Women Under Fire provides a way for Western scholars to enter into academic debates on the embodiment of war, national traumas, and women's political agency.
Careful readers of this thoughtful collection of essays by and for African women will be richly rewarded.
