Women Writing Africa: The Eastern Region is the third volume in a remarkable series of four books designed to restore the lost voices of African women. With a blend of oral and written texts, including poems, songs, speeches, stories, letters, biographies and reminiscences, the collection documents women's reflections and creativity over a period of nearly 300 years, primarily from the 1850s to 2003. (One brief letter from the Sultan of Kilwa Island dates to 1711.) As in all the books in the series, the texts were collected and screened by a large editorial team of women and several men from each country and region, who met as a group several times to make the final selection. There are 5 general editors, 7 associate editors, 2 contributing editors, a text editor and 27 translators and headnote writers, making the book in every way a collaborative project. Texts were evaluated on the basis of aesthetic qualities as well as their sociohistorical significance. But the selection consciously emphasizes women's struggle for survival and empowerment in male-dominated worlds; indeed the editors are explicit about the feminist intent of the project. The Eastern Africa volume covers Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia and Malawi, a grouping justified on the basis of their common heritage of English and, for Tanzania and Kenya and, to a lesser extent, Uganda, Kiswahili.

The wide range of women's voices, including texts in many African languages, makes this book a rich and original resource for historians, as do the wide-ranging topics of the selections, which cover every aspect of women's lives, from relationships between women and men to religion, slavery, work, politics, education and the myriad forms of women's individual and collective resistance. A lengthy introduction to the entire book and the detailed and informative headnotes for each document provide the background to put the selections into their historical context. Whether as a deliberate challenge to conventional periodization or not, the book eschews the end of colonial rule as a dividing point and instead splits the mid and late twentieth century into two periods – mid (1936–69) and late (1970–95).

Although the book is historically structured, the editors, all literary scholars, have chosen to arrange texts by the date they were published or collected rather than according to the events they describe. Thus, to give only one of many possible examples, ‘Mekatilili, the Mijikenda Warrior’, who fought against colonial conquest during the early twentieth century, appears under 2000 when the text was collected. As a historian, I would have welcomed an explicit discussion of this organizational choice. But the range of topics and women's voices, the introduction's nuanced treatment of current issues around education, politics, sexual exploitation and women's writing and its strong statement in support of African feminism make Women Writing Africa: The Eastern Region a milestone in scholarly efforts to restore women's voices to the center of African historical understanding.